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diff --git a/old/51575-0.txt b/old/51575-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a1e90d9..0000000 --- a/old/51575-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5974 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, 1908-1919, by John Drinkwater - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: Poems, 1908-1919 - -Author: John Drinkwater - -Release Date: March 27, 2016 [EBook #51575] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, 1908-1919 *** - - - - -Produced by MWS, Bryan Ness, Chuck Greif and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - - - - - - - - - - - POEMS - 1908-1919 - - [Illustration: _John Drinkwater_ - - _From a drawing by William Rothenstein_ - - _1917_ - - _Emery Walker ph. sc._] - - - - - POEMS - 1908-1919 - - BY - JOHN DRINKWATER - - [Illustration: colophon] - - BOSTON AND NEW YORK - HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY - The Riverside Press Cambridge - - COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY JOHN DRINKWATER - - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - - TO - MY WIFE - - - - -CONTENTS - - -RECIPROCITY 1 - -THE HOURS 2 - -A TOWN WINDOW 4 - -MYSTERY 5 - -THE COMMON LOT 7 - -PASSAGE 8 - -THE WOOD 9 - -HISTORY 10 - -THE FUGITIVE 12 - -CONSTANCY 13 - -SOUTHAMPTON BELLS 15 - -THE NEW MIRACLE 17 - -REVERIE 18 - -PENANCES 26 - -LAST CONFESSIONAL 27 - -BIRTHRIGHT 29 - -ANTAGONISTS 30 - -HOLINESS 31 - -THE CITY 32 - -TO THE DEFILERS 33 - -A CHRISTMAS NIGHT 34 - -INVOCATION 35 - -IMMORTALITY 36 - -THE CRAFTSMEN 38 - -SYMBOLS 39 - -SEALED 40 - -A PRAYER 43 - -THE BUILDING 45 - -THE SOLDIER 48 - -THE FIRES OF GOD 49 - -CHALLENGE 60 - -TRAVEL TALK 61 - -THE VAGABOND 66 - -OLD WOMAN IN MAY 67 - -THE FECKENHAM MEN 68 - -THE TRAVELLER 70 - -IN LADY STREET 71 - -ANTHONY CRUNDLE 75 - -MAD TOM TATTERMAN 76 - -FOR CORIN TO-DAY 78 - -THE CARVER IN STONE 79 - -ELIZABETH ANN 91 - -THE COTSWOLD FARMERS 92 - -A MAN’S DAUGHTER 93 - -THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE 95 - -THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON 98 - -MRS. WILLOW 99 - -ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR 101 - -LIEGEWOMAN 105 - -LOVERS TO LOVERS 106 - -LOVE’S PERSONALITY 107 - -PIERROT 108 - -RECKONING 110 - -DERELICT 112 - -WED 113 - -FORSAKEN 115 - -DEFIANCE 116 - -LOVE IN OCTOBER 117 - -TO THE LOVERS THAT COME AFTER US 118 - -DERBYSHIRE SONG 119 - -LOVE’S HOUSE 120 - -COTSWOLD LOVE 124 - -WITH DAFFODILS 125 - -FOUNDATIONS 126 - -DEAR AND INCOMPARABLE 127 - -A SABBATH DAY 128 - -A DEDICATION 134 - -RUPERT BROOKE 136 - -ON READING FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S LAST SONGS 137 - -IN THE WOODS 138 - -LATE SUMMER 139 - -JANUARY DUSK 140 - -AT GRAFTON 141 - -DOMINION 142 - -THE MIRACLE 144 - -MILLERS DALE 145 - -WRITTEN AT LUDLOW CASTLE 146 - -WORDSWORTH AT GRASMERE 147 - -SUNRISE ON RYDAL WATER 148 - -SEPTEMBER 150 - -OLTON POOLS 151 - -OF GREATHAM 152 - -MAMBLE 154 - -OUT OF THE MOON 155 - -MOONLIT APPLES 156 - -COTTAGE SONG 157 - -THE MIDLANDS 158 - -OLD CROW 160 - -VENUS IN ARDEN 162 - -ON A LAKE 163 - -HARVEST MOON 164 - -AT AN EARTHWORKS 165 - -INSTRUCTION 166 - -HABITATION 167 - -WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME CHURCH 169 - -BUDS 171 - -BLACKBIRD 172 - -MAY GARDEN 173 - -AT AN INN 174 - -PERSPECTIVE 176 - -CROCUSES 177 - -RIDDLES R.F.C. 179 - -THE SHIPS OF GRIEF 180 - -NOCTURNE 181 - -THE PATRIOT 182 - -EPILOGUE FOR A MASQUE 184 - -THE GUEST 185 - -TREASON 186 - -POLITICS 187 - -FOR A GUEST ROOM 189 - -DAY 190 - -DREAMS 191 - -RESPONSIBILITY 192 - -PROVOCATIONS 193 - -TRIAL 194 - -CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS 195 - -CHARACTER 196 - -REALITY 197 - -EPILOGUE 198 - -MOONRISE 200 - -DEER 201 - -TO ONE I LOVE 202 - -TO ALICE MEYNELL 205 - -PETITION 206 - -HARVESTING 208 - - - - - POEMS - - 1908-1919 - - - - -RECIPROCITY - - - I do not think that skies and meadows are - Moral, or that the fixture of a star - Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees - Have wisdom in their windless silences. - Yet these are things invested in my mood - With constancy, and peace, and fortitude, - That in my troubled season I can cry - Upon the wide composure of the sky, - And envy fields, and wish that I might be - As little daunted as a star or tree. - - - - -THE HOURS - - - Those hours are best when suddenly - The voices of the world are still, - And in that quiet place is heard - The voice of one small singing bird, - Alone within his quiet tree; - - When to one field that crowns a hill, - With but the sky for neighbourhood, - The crowding counties of my brain - Give all their riches, lake and plain, - Cornland and fell and pillared wood; - When in a hill-top acre, bare - For the seed’s use, I am aware - Of all the beauty that an age - Of earth has taught my eyes to see; - - When Pride and Generosity - The Constant Heart and Evil Rage, - Affection and Desire, and all - The passions of experience - Are no more tabled in my mind, - Learning’s idolatry, but find - Particularity of sense - In daily fortitudes that fall - From this or that companion, - Or in an angry gossip’s word; - When one man speaks for Every One, - When Music lives in one small bird, - When in a furrowed hill we see - All beauty in epitome-- - Those hours are best; for those belong - To the lucidity of song. - - - - -A TOWN WINDOW - - - Beyond my window in the night - Is but a drab inglorious street, - Yet there the frost and clean starlight - As over Warwick woods are sweet. - - Under the grey drift of the town - The crocus works among the mould - As eagerly as those that crown - The Warwick spring in flame and gold. - - And when the tramway down the hill - Across the cobbles moans and rings, - There is about my window-sill - The tumult of a thousand wings. - - - - -MYSTERY - - - Think not that mystery has place - In the obscure and veilèd face, - Or when the midnight watches are - Uncompanied of moon or star, - Or where the fields and forests lie - Enfolded from the loving eye - By fogs rebellious to the sun, - Or when the poet’s rhymes are spun - From dreams that even in his own - Imagining are half-unknown. - - These are not mystery, but mere - Conditions that deny the clear - Reality that lies behind - The weak, unspeculative mind, - Behind contagions of the air - And screens of beauty everywhere, - The brooding and tormented sky, - The hesitation of an eye. - - Look rather when the landscapes glow - Through crystal distances as though - The forty shires of England spread - Into one vision harvested, - Or when the moonlit waters lie - In silver cold lucidity; - Those countenances search that bear - Witness to very character, - And listen to the song that weighs - A life’s adventure in a phrase-- - These are the founts of wonder, these - The plainer miracles to please - The brain that reads the world aright; - Here is the mystery of light. - - - - -THE COMMON LOT - - - When youth and summer-time are gone, - And age puts quiet garlands on, - And in the speculative eye - The fires of emulation die, - But as to-day our time shall be - Trembling upon eternity, - While, still inconstant in debate, - We shall on revelation wait, - And age as youth will daily plan - The sailing of the caravan. - - - - -PASSAGE - - - When you deliberate the page - Of Alexander’s pilgrimage, - Or say--“It is three years, or ten, - Since Easter slew Connolly’s men,” - Or prudently to judgment come - Of Antony or Absalom, - And think how duly are designed - Case and instruction for the mind, - Remember then that also we, - In a moon’s course, are history. - - - - -THE WOOD - - - I walked a nut-wood’s gloom. And overhead - A pigeon’s wing beat on the hidden boughs, - And shrews upon shy tunnelling woke thin - Late winter leaves with trickling sound. Across - My narrow path I saw the carrier ants - Burdened with little pieces of bright straw. - These things I heard and saw, with senses fine - For all the little traffic of the wood, - While everywhere, above me, underfoot, - And haunting every avenue of leaves, - Was mystery, unresting, taciturn. - - * * * * * - - And haunting the lucidities of life - That are my daily beauty, moves a theme, - Beating along my undiscovered mind. - - - - -HISTORY - - - Sometimes, when walls and occupation seem - A prison merely, a dark barrier - Between me everywhere - And life, or the larger province of the mind, - As dreams confined, - As the trouble of a dream, - I seek to make again a life long gone, - To be - My mind’s approach and consolation, - To give it form’s lucidity, - Resilient form, as porcelain pieces thrown - In buried China by a wrist unknown, - Or mirrored brigs upon Fowey sea. - - Then to my memory comes nothing great - Of purpose, or debate, - Or perfect end, - Pomp, nor love’s rapture, nor heroic hours to spend-- - But most, and strangely, for long and so much have I seen, - Comes back an afternoon - Of a June - Sunday at Elsfield, that is up on a green - Hill, and there, - Through a little farm parlour door, - A floor - Of red tiles and blue, - And the air - Sweet with the hot June sun cascading through - The vine-leaves under the glass, and a scarlet fume - Of geranium flower, and soft and yellow bloom - Of musk, and stains of scarlet and yellow glass. - - Such are the things remain - Quietly, and for ever, in the brain, - And the things that they choose for history-making pass. - - - - -THE FUGITIVE - - - Beauty has come to make no longer stay - Than the bright buds of May - In May-time do. - - Beauty is with us for one hour, one hour, - Life is so brief a flower; - Thoughts are so few. - - Thoughts are so few with mastery to give - Shape to these fugitive - Dear brevities, - - That even in its hour beauty is blind, - Because the shallow mind - Not sees, not sees. - - And in the mind of man only can be - Alert prosperity - For beauty brief. - - So, what can be but little comes to less - Upon the wilderness - Of unbelief. - - And beauty that has but an hour to spend - With you for friend, - Goes outcast by. - - But know, but know--for all she is outcast-- - It is not she at last, - But you that die. - - - - -CONSTANCY - - - The shadows that companion me - From chronicles and poetry - More constant and substantial are - Than these my men familiar, - Who draw with me uncertain breath - A little while this side of death; - For you, my friend, may fail to keep - To-morrow’s tryst, so darkly deep - The motions mutable that give - To flesh its brief prerogative, - And in the pleasant hours we make - Together for devotion’s sake, - Always the testament I see - That is our twin mortality. - But those from the recorded page - Keep an eternal pilgrimage. - They stedfastly inhabit here - With no mortality to fear, - And my communion with them - Ails not in the mind’s stratagem - Against the sudden blow, the date - That once must fall unfortunate. - They fret not nor persuade, and when - These graduates I entertain, - I grieve not that I too must fall - As you, my friend, to funeral, - But rather find example there - That, when my boughs of time are bare, - And nothing more the body’s chance - Governs my careful circumstance, - I shall, upon that later birth, - Walk in immortal fields of earth. - - - - -SOUTHAMPTON BELLS - - -I - - Long ago some builder thrust - Heavenward in Southampton town - His spire and beamed his bells, - Largely conceiving from the dust - That pinnacle for ringing down - Orisons and Noëls. - - In his imagination rang, - Through generations challenging - His peal on simple men, - Who, as the heart within him sang, - In daily townfaring should sing - By year and year again. - - -II - - Now often to their ringing go - The bellmen with lean Time at heel, - Intent on daily cares; - The bells ring high, the bells ring low, - The ringers ring the builder’s peal - Of tidings unawares. - - And all the bells’ might well be dumb - For any quickening in the street - Of customary ears; - And so at last proud builders come - With dreams and virtues to defeat - Among the clouding years. - - -III - - Now, waiting on Southampton sea - For exile, through the silver night - I hear Noël! Noël! - Through generations down to me - Your challenge, builder, comes aright, - Bell by obedient bell. - - You wake an hour with me; then wide - Though be the lapses of your sleep - You yet shall wake again; - And thus, old builder, on the tide - Of immortality you keep - Your way from brain to brain. - - - - -THE NEW MIRACLE - - - Of old men wrought strange gods for mystery, - Implored miraculous tokens in the skies, - And lips that most were strange in prophecy - Were most accounted wise. - - The hearthstone’s commerce between mate and mate, - Barren of wonder, prospered in content, - And still the hunger of their thought was great - For sweet astonishment. - - And so they built them altars of retreat - Where life’s familiar use was overthrown, - And left the shining world about their feet, - To travel worlds unknown. - - * * * * * - - We hunger still. But wonder has come down - From alien skies upon the midst of us; - The sparkling hedgerow and the clamorous town - Have grown miraculous. - - And man from his far travelling returns - To find yet stranger wisdom than he sought, - Where in the habit of his threshold burns - Unfathomable thought. - - - - -REVERIE - - - Here in the unfrequented noon, - In the green hermitage of June, - While overhead a rustling wing - Minds me of birds that do not sing - Until the cooler eve rewakes - The service of melodious brakes, - And thoughts are lonely rangers, here, - In shelter of the primrose year, - I curiously meditate - Our brief and variable state. - - I think how many are alive - Who better in the grave would thrive, - If some so long a sleep might give - Better instruction how to live; - I think what splendours had been said - By darlings now untimely dead - Had death been wise in choice of these, - And made exchange of obsequies. - - I think what loss to government - It is that good men are content-- - Well knowing that an evil will - Is folly-stricken too, and still - Itself considers only wise - For all rebukes and surgeries-- - That evil men should raise their pride - To place and fortune undefied. - I think how daily we beguile - Our brains, that yet a little while - And all our congregated schemes - And our perplexity of dreams, - Shall come to whole and perfect state. - I think, however long the date - Of life may be, at last the sun - Shall pass upon campaigns undone. - - I look upon the world and see - A world colonial to me, - Whereof I am the architect, - And principal and intellect, - A world whose shape and savour spring - Out of my lone imagining, - A world whose nature is subdued - For ever to my instant mood, - And only beautiful can be - Because of beauty is in me. - And then I know that every mind - Among the millions of my kind - Makes earth his own particular - And privately created star, - That earth has thus no single state, - Being every man articulate. - Till thought has no horizon then - I try to think how many men - There are to make an earth apart - In symbol of the urgent heart, - For there are forty in my street, - And seven hundred more in Greet, - And families at Luton Hoo, - And there are men in China, too. - - And what immensity is this - That is but a parenthesis - Set in a little human thought, - Before the body comes to naught. - There at the bottom of the copse - I see a field of turnip tops, - I see the cropping cattle pass - There in another field, of grass. - And fields and fields, with seven towns, - A river, and a flight of downs, - Steeples for all religious men, - Ten thousand trees, and orchards ten, - A mighty span that curves away - Into blue beauty, and I lay - All this as quartered on a sphere - Hung huge in space, a thing of fear - Vast as the circle of the sky - Completed to the astonished eye; - And then I think that all I see, - Whereof I frame immensity - Globed for amazement, is no more - Than a shire’s corner, and that four - Great shires being ten times multiplied - Are small on the Atlantic tide - As an emerald on a silver bowl ... - And the Atlantic to the whole - Sweep of this tributary star - That is our earth is but ... and far - Through dreadful space the outmeasured mind - Seeks to conceive the unconfined. - - I think of Time. How, when his wing - Composes all our quarrelling - In some green corner where May leaves - Are loud with blackbirds on all eves, - And all the dust that was our bones - Is underneath memorial stones, - Then shall old jealousies, while we - Lie side by side most quietly, - Be but oblivion’s fools, and still - When curious pilgrims ask--“What skill - Had these that from oblivion saves?”-- - My song shall sing above our graves. - - I think how men of gentle mind, - And friendly will, and honest kind, - Deny their nature and appear - Fellows of jealousy and fear; - Having single faith, and natural wit - To measure truth and cherish it, - Yet, strangely, when they build in thought, - Twisting the honesty that wrought - In the straight motion of the heart, - Into its feigning counterpart - That is the brain’s betrayal of - The simple purposes of love; - And what yet sorrier decline - Is theirs when, eager to confine - No more within the silent brain - Its habit, thought seeks birth again - In speech, as honesty has done - In thought; then even what had won - From heart to brain fades and is lost - In this pretended pentecost, - This their forlorn captivity - To speech, who have not learnt to be - Lords of the word, nor kept among - The sterner climates of the tongue ... - So truth is in their hearts, and then - Falls to confusion in the brain, - And, fading through this mid-eclipse, - It perishes upon the lips. - - I think how year by year I still - Find working in my dauntless will - Sudden timidities that are - Merely the echo of some far - Forgotten tyrannies that came - To youth’s bewilderment and shame; - That yet a magisterial gown, - Being worn by one of no renown - And half a generation less - In years than I, can dispossess - Something my circumspecter mood - Of excellence and quietude, - And if a Bishop speaks to me - I tremble with propriety. - - I think how strange it is that he - Who goes most comradely with me - In beauty’s worship, takes delight - In shows that to my eager sight - Are shadows and unmanifest, - While beauty’s favour and behest - To me in motion are revealed - That is against his vision sealed; - Yet is our hearts’ necessity - Not twofold, but a common plea - That chaos come to continence, - Whereto the arch-intelligence - Richly in divers voices makes - Its answer for our several sakes. - - I see the disinherited - And long procession of the dead, - Who have in generations gone - Held fugitive dominion - Of this same primrose pasturage - That is my momentary wage. - I see two lovers move along - These shadowed silences of song, - With spring in blossom at their feet - More incommunicably sweet - To their hearts’ more magnificence, - Than to the common courts of sense, - Till joy his tardy closure tells - With coming of the curfew bells. - I see the knights of spur and sword - Crossing the little woodland ford, - Riding in ghostly cavalcade - On some unchronicled crusade. - I see the silent hunter go - In cloth of yeoman green, with bow - Strung, and a quiver of grey wings. - I see the little herd who brings - His cattle homeward, while his sire - Makes bivouac in Warwickshire - This night, the liege and loyal man - Of Cavalier or Puritan. - And as they pass, the nameless dead, - Unsung, uncelebrate, and sped - Upon an unremembered hour - As any twelvemonth fallen flower, - I think how strangely yet they live - For all their days were fugitive. - - I think how soon we too shall be - A story with our ancestry. - - I think what miracle has been - That you whose love among this green - Delightful solitude is still - The stay and substance of my will, - The dear custodian of my song, - My thrifty counsellor and strong, - Should take the time of all time’s tide - That was my season, to abide - On earth also; that we should be - Charted across eternity - To one elect and happy day - Of yellow primroses in May. - - The clock is calling five o’clock, - And Nonesopretty brings her flock - To fold, and Tom comes back from town - With hose and ribbons worth a crown, - And duly at The Old King’s Head - They gather now to daily bread, - And I no more may meditate - Our brief and variable state. - - - - -PENANCES - - - These are my happy penances. To make - Beauty without a covenant; to take - Measure of time only because I know - That in death’s market-place I still shall owe - Service to beauty that shall not be done; - To know that beauty’s doctrine is begun - And makes a close in sacrifice; to find - In beauty’s courts the unappeasable mind. - - - - -LAST CONFESSIONAL - - - For all ill words that I have spoken, - For all clear moods that I have broken, - For all despite and hasty breath, - Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death. - - Death, master of the great assize, - Love, falling now to memories, - You two alone I need to prove, - Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love. - - For every tenderness undone, - For pride when holiness was none - But only easy charity, - O Death, be pardoner to me. - - For stubborn thought that would not make - Measure of love’s thought for love’s sake, - But kept a sullen difference, - Take, Love, this laggard penitence. - - For cloudy words too vainly spent - To prosper but in argument, - When truth stood lonely at the gate, - On your compassion, Death, I wait. - - For all the beauty that escaped - This foolish brain, unsung, unshaped, - For wonder that was slow to move, - Forgive me, Death, forgive me, Love. - - For love that kept a secret cruse, - For life defeated of its dues, - This latest word of all my breath-- - Forgive me, Love, forgive me, Death. - - - - -BIRTHRIGHT - - - Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed - Because a summer evening passed; - And little Ariadne cried - That summer fancy fell at last - To dust; and young Verona died - When beauty’s hour was overcast. - - Theirs was the bitterness we know - Because the clouds of hawthorn keep - So short a state, and kisses go - To tombs unfathomably deep, - While Rameses and Romeo - And little Ariadne sleep. - - - - -ANTAGONISTS - - - Green shoots, we break the morning earth - And flourish in the morning’s breath; - We leave the agony of birth - And soon are all midway to death. - - While yet the summer of her year - Brings life her marvels, she can see - Far off the rising dust, and hear - The footfall of her enemy. - - - - -HOLINESS - - - If all the carts were painted gay, - And all the streets swept clean, - And all the children came to play - By hollyhocks, with green - Grasses to grow between, - - If all the houses looked as though - Some heart were in their stones, - If all the people that we know - Were dressed in scarlet gowns, - With feathers in their crowns, - - I think this gaiety would make - A spiritual land. - I think that holiness would take - This laughter by the hand, - Till both should understand. - - - - -THE CITY - - - A shining city, one - Happy in snow and sun, - And singing in the rain - A paradisal strain.... - Here is a dream to keep, - O Builders, from your sleep. - - O foolish Builders, wake, - Take your trowels, take - The poet’s dream, and build - The city song has willed, - That every stone may sing - And all your roads may ring - With happy wayfaring. - - - - -TO THE DEFILERS - - - Go, thieves, and take your riches, creep - To corners out of honest sight; - We shall not be so poor to keep - One thought of envy or despite. - - But know that in sad surety when - Your sullen will betrays this earth - To sorrows of contagion, then - Beelzebub renews his birth. - - When you defile the pleasant streams - And the wild bird’s abiding-place, - You massacre a million dreams - And cast your spittle in God’s face. - - - - -A CHRISTMAS NIGHT - - - Christ for a dream was given from the dead - To walk one Christmas night on earth again, - Among the snow, among the Christmas bells. - He heard the hymns that are his praise: _Noël_, - And _Christ is Born_, and _Babe of Bethlehem_. - He saw the travelling crowds happy for home, - The gathering and the welcome, and the set - Feast and the gifts, because he once was born, - Because he once was steward of a word. - And so he thought, “The spirit has been kind; - So well the peoples might have fallen from me, - My way of life being difficult and spare. - It is beautiful that a dream in Galilee - Should prosper so. They crucified me once, - And now my name is spoken through the world, - And bells are rung for me and candles burnt. - They might have crucified my dream who used - My body ill; they might have spat on me - Always as in one hour on Golgotha.” ... - And the snow fell, and the last bell was still, - And the poor Christ again was with the dead. - - - - -INVOCATION - - - As pools beneath stone arches take - Darkly within their deeps again - Shapes of the flowing stone, and make - Stories anew of passing men, - - So let the living thoughts that keep, - Morning and evening, in their kind, - Eternal change in height and deep, - Be mirrored in my happy mind. - - Beat, world, upon this heart, be loud - Your marvel chanted in my blood, - Come forth, O sun, through cloud on cloud - To shine upon my stubborn mood. - - Great hills that fold above the sea, - Ecstatic airs and sparkling skies, - Sing out your words to master me, - Make me immoderately wise. - - - - -IMMORTALITY - - -I - - When other beauty governs other lips, - And snowdrops come to strange and happy springs, - When seas renewed bear yet unbuilded ships, - And alien hearts know all familiar things, - When frosty nights bring comrades to enjoy - Sweet hours at hearths where we no longer sit, - When Liverpool is one with dusty Troy, - And London famed as Attica for wit ... - How shall it be with you, and you, and you, - How with us all who have gone greatly here - In friendship, making some delight, some true - Song in the dark, some story against fear? - Shall song still walk with love, and life be brave, - And we, who were all these, be but the grave? - - -II - - No; lovers yet shall tell the nightingale - Sometimes a song that we of old time made, - And gossips gathered at the twilight ale - Shall say, “Those two were friends,” or, “Unafraid - Of bitter thought were those because they loved - Better than most.” And sometimes shall be told - How one, who died in his young beauty, moved, - As Astrophel, those English hearts of old. - And the new seas shall take the new ships home - Telling how yet the Dymock orchards stand, - And you shall walk with Julius at Rome, - And Paul shall be my fellow in the Strand; - There in the midst of all those words shall be - Our names, our ghosts, our immortality. - - - - -THE CRAFTSMEN - - - Confederate hand and eye - Work to the chisel’s blade, - Setting the grain aglow - Of porch and sturdy beam-- - So the strange gods may ply - Strict arms till we are made - Quick as the gods who know - What builds behind this dream. - - - - -SYMBOLS - - - I saw history in a poet’s song, - In a river-reach and a gallows-hill, - In a bridal bed, and a secret wrong, - In a crown of thorns: in a daffodil. - - I imagined measureless time in a day, - And starry space in a waggon-road, - And the treasure of all good harvests lay - In the single seed that the sower sowed. - - My garden-wind had driven and havened again - All ships that ever had gone to sea, - And I saw the glory of all dead men - In the shadow that went by the side of me. - - - - -SEALED - - - The doves call down the long arcades of pine, - The screaming swifts are tiring towards their eaves, - And you are very quiet, O lover of mine. - - No foot is on your ploughlands now, the song - Fails and is no more heard among your leaves - That wearied not in praise the whole day long. - - I have watched with you till this twilight-fall, - The proud companion of your loveliness; - Have you no word for me, no word at all? - - The passion of my thought I have given you, - Striving towards your passion, nevertheless, - The clover leaves are deepening to the dew, - - And I am still unsatisfied, untaught. - You lie guarded in mystery, you go - Into your night, and leave your lover naught. - - Would I were Titan with immeasurable thews - To hold you trembling, lover of mine, and know - To the full the secret savour that you use - - Now to my tormenting. I would drain - Your beauty to the last sharp glory of it; - You should work mightily through me, blood and brain. - - Your heart in my heart’s mastery should burn, - And you before my swift and arrogant wit - Should be no longer proudly taciturn. - - You should bend back astonished at my kiss, - Your wisdom should be armourer to my pride, - And you, subdued, should yet be glad of this. - - The joys of great heroic lovers dead - Should seem but market-gossiping beside - The annunciation of our bridal bed. - - And now, my lover earth, I am a leaf, - A wave of light, a bird’s note, a blade sprung - Towards the oblivion of the sickled sheaf; - - A mere mote driven against your royal ease, - A tattered eager traveller among - The myriads beating on your sanctuaries. - - I have no strength to crush you to my will, - Your beauty is invulnerably zoned, - Yet I, your undefeated lover still, - - Exulting in your sap am clear of shame, - And biding with you patiently am throned - Above the flight of desolation’s aim. - - You may be mute, bestow no recompense - On all the thriftless leaguers of my soul-- - I am at your gates, O lover of mine, and thence - - Will I not turn for any scorn you send, - Rebuked, bemused, yet is my purpose whole, - I shall be striving towards you till the end. - - - - -A PRAYER - - - Lord, not for light in darkness do we pray, - Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes, - Nor that the slow ascension of our day - Be otherwise. - - Not for a clearer vision of the things - Whereof the fashioning shall make us great, - Not for remission of the peril and stings - Of time and fate. - - Not for a fuller knowledge of the end - Whereto we travel, bruised yet unafraid, - Nor that the little healing that we lend - Shall be repaid. - - Not these, O Lord. We would not break the bars - Thy wisdom sets about us; we shall climb - Unfettered to the secrets of the stars - In Thy good time. - - We do not crave the high perception swift - When to refrain were well, and when fulfil, - Nor yet the understanding strong to sift - The good from ill. - - Not these, O Lord. For these Thou hast revealed, - We know the golden season when to reap - The heavy-fruited treasure of the field, - The hour to sleep. - - Not these. We know the hemlock from the rose, - The pure from stained, the noble from the base - The tranquil holy light of truth that glows - On Pity’s face. - - We know the paths wherein our feet should press, - Across our hearts are written Thy decrees, - Yet now, O Lord, be merciful to bless - With more than these. - - Grant us the will to fashion as we feel, - Grant us the strength to labour as we know, - Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel, - To strike the blow. - - Knowledge we ask not--knowledge Thou hast lent, - But, Lord, the will--there lies our bitter need, - Give us to build above the deep intent - The deed, the deed. - - - - -THE BUILDING - - - Whence these hods, and bricks of bright red clay, - And swart men climbing ladders in the night? - - Stilled are the clamorous energies of day, - The streets are dumb, and, prodigal of light, - The lamps but shine upon a city of sleep. - A step goes out into the silence; far - Across the quiet roofs the hour is tolled - From ghostly towers; the indifferent earth may keep - That ragged flotsam shielded from the cold - In earth’s good time: not, moving among men, - Shall he compel so fortunate a star. - Pavements I know, forsaken now, are strange, - Alien walks not beautiful, that then, - In the familiar day, are part of all - My breathless pilgrimage, not beautiful, but dear; - The monotony of sound has suffered change, - The eddies of wanton sound are spent, and clear - To bleak monotonies of silence fall. - - And, while the city sleeps, in the central poise - Of quiet, lamps are flaming in the night, - Blown to long tongues by winds that moan between - The growing walls, and throwing misty light - On swart men bearing bricks of bright red clay - In laden hods; and ever the thin noise - Of trowels deftly fashioning the clean - Long lines that are the shaping of proud thought. - Ghost-like they move between the day and day, - These men whose labour strictly shall be wrought - Into the captive image of a dream. - Their sinews weary not, the plummet falls - To measured use from steadfast hands apace, - And momently the moist and levelled seam - Knits brick to brick and momently the walls - Bestow the wonder of form on formless space. - - And whence all these? The hod and plummet-line, - The trowels tapping, and the lamps that shine - In long, dust-heavy beams from wall to wall, - The mortar and the bricks of bright red clay, - Ladder and corded scaffolding, and all - The gear of common traffic--whence are they? - And whence the men who use them? - When he came, - God upon chaos, crying in the name - Of all adventurous vision that the void - Should yield up man, and man, created, rose - Out of the deep, the marvel of all things made, - Then in immortal wonder was destroyed - All worth of trivial knowledge, and the close - Of man’s most urgent meditation stayed - Even as his first thought--“Whence am I sprung?” - What proud ecstatic mystery was pent - In that first act for man’s astonishment, - From age to unconfessing age, among - His manifold travel. And in all I see - Of common daily usage is renewed - This primal and ecstatic mystery - Of chaos bidden into many-hued - Wonders of form, life in the void create, - And monstrous silence made articulate. - - Not the first word of God upon the deep - Nor the first pulse of life along the day - More marvellous than these new walls that sweep - Starward, these lines that discipline the clay, - These lamps swung in the wind that send their light - On swart men climbing ladders in the night. - No trowel-tap but sings anew for men - The rapture of quickening water and continent, - No mortared line but witnesses again - Chaos transfigured into lineament. - - - - -THE SOLDIER - - - The large report of fame I lack, - And shining clasps and crimson scars, - For I have held my bivouac - Alone amid the untroubled stars. - - My battle-field has known no dawn - Beclouded by a thousand spears; - I’ve been no mounting tyrant’s pawn - To buy his glory with my tears. - - It never seemed a noble thing - Some little leagues of land to gain - From broken men, nor yet to fling - Abroad the thunderbolts of pain. - - Yet I have felt the quickening breath - As peril heavy peril kissed-- - My weapon was a little faith, - And fear was my antagonist. - - Not a brief hour of cannonade, - But many days of bitter strife, - Till God of His great pity laid - Across my brow the leaves of life. - - - - -THE FIRES OF GOD - - -I - - Time gathers to my name; - Along the ways wheredown my feet have passed - I see the years with little triumph crowned, - Exulting not for perils dared, downcast - And weary-eyed and desolate for shame - Of having been unstirred of all the sound - Of the deep music of the men that move - Through the world’s days in suffering and love. - - Poor barren years that brooded over-much - On your own burden, pale and stricken years-- - Go down to your oblivion, we part - With no reproach or ceremonial tears. - Henceforth my hands are lifted to the touch - Of hands that labour with me, and my heart - Hereafter to the world’s heart shall be set - And its own pain forget. - Time gathers to my name-- - Days dead are dark; the days to be, a flame - Of wonder and of promise, and great cries - Of travelling people reach me--I must rise. - - -II - - Was I not man? Could I not rise alone - Above the shifting of the things that be, - Rise to the crest of all the stars and see - The ways of all the world as from a throne? - Was I not man, with proud imperial will - To cancel all the secrets of high heaven? - Should not my sole unbridled purpose fill - All hidden paths with light when once was riven - God’s veil by my indomitable will? - - So dreamt I, little man of little vision, - Great only in unconsecrated pride; - Man’s pity grew from pity to derision, - And still I thought, “Albeit they deride, - Yet is it mine uncharted ways to dare - Unknown to these, - And they shall stumble darkly, unaware - Of solemn mysteries - Whereof the key is mine alone to bear.” - - So I forgot my God, and I forgot - The holy sweet communion of men, - And moved in desolate places, where are not - Meek hands held out with patient healing when - The hours are heavy with uncharitable pain; - No company but vain - And arrogant thoughts were with me at my side. - And ever to myself I lied. - Saying “Apart from all men thus I go - To know the things that they may never know.” - - -III - - Then a great change befell; - Long time I stood - In witless hardihood - With eyes on one sole changeless vision set-- - The deep disturbèd fret - Of men who made brief tarrying in hell - On their earth travelling. - It was as though the lives of men should be - See circle-wise, whereof one little span - Through which all passed was blackened with the wing - Of perilous evil, bateless misery. - But all beyond, making the whole complete - O’er which the travelling feet - Of every man - Made way or ever he might come to death, - Was odorous with the breath - Of honey-laden flowers, and alive - With sacrificial ministrations sweet - Of man to man, and swift and holy loves, - And large heroic hopes, whereby should thrive - Man’s spirit as he moves - From dawn of life to the great dawn of death. - - It was as though mine eyes were set alone - Upon that woeful passage of despair, - Until I held that life had never known - Dominion but in this most troubled place - Where many a ruined grace - And many a friendless care - Ran to and fro in sorrowful unrest. - Still in my hand I pressed - Hope’s fragile chalice, whence I drew deep draughts - That heartened me that even yet should grow - Out of this dread confusion, as of broken crafts - Driven along ungovernable seas, - Prosperous order, and that I should know - After long vigil all the mysteries - Of human wonder and of human fate. - - O fool, O only great - In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart! - Confusion but more dark confusion bred, - Grief nurtured grief, I cried aloud and said, - “Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled, - No sign upon the forehead of the skies, - No beacon, and no chart - Are given to him, and the inscrutable world - But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.” - - _And lies bore lies_ - _And lust bore lust,_ - _And the world was heavy with flowerless rods,_ - _And pride outran_ - _The strength of a man_ - _Who had set himself in the place of gods._ - - -IV - - Soon was I then to gather bitter shame - Of spirit; I had been most wildly proud-- - Yet in my pride had been - Some little courage, formless as a cloud, - Unpiloted save by a vagrant wind, - But still an earnest of the bonds that tame - The legionary hates, of sacred loves that lean - From the high soul of man towards his kind. - And all my grief - Had been for those I watched go to and fro - In uncompassioned woe - Along that little span my unbelief - Had fashioned in my vision as all life. - Now even this so little virtue waned, - For I became caught up into the strife - That I had pitied, and my soul was stained - At last by that most venomous despair, - Self-pity. - I no longer was aware - Of any will to heal the world’s unrest, - I suffered as it suffered, and I grew - Troubled in all my daily trafficking, - Not with the large heroic trouble known - By proud adventurous men who would atone - With their own passionate pity for the sting - And anguish of a world of peril and snares, - It was the trouble of a soul in thrall - To mean despairs, - Driven about a waste where neither fall - Of words from lips of love, nor consolation - Of grave eyes comforting, nor ministration - Of hand or heart could pierce the deadly wall - Of self--of self,--I was a living shame-- - A broken purpose. I had stood apart - With pride rebellious and defiant heart, - And now my pride had perished in the flame. - I cried for succour as a little child - Might supplicate whose days are undefiled,-- - For tutored pride and innocence are one. - - _To the gloom has won_ - _A gleam of the sun_ - _And into the barren desolate ways_ - _A scent is blown_ - _As of meadows mown_ - _By cooling rivers in clover days._ - - -V - - I turned me from that place in humble wise, - And fingers soft were laid upon mine eyes, - And I beheld the fruitful earth, with store - Of odorous treasure, full and golden grain, - Ripe orchard bounty, slender stalks that bore - Their flowered beauty with a meek content, - The prosperous leaves that loved the sun and rain, - Shy creatures unreproved that came and went - In garrulous joy among the fostering green. - And, over all, the changes of the day - And ordered year their mutable glory laid-- - Expectant winter soberly arrayed, - The prudent diligent spring whose eyes have seen - The beauty of the roses uncreate, - Imperial June, magnificent, elate - Beholding all the ripening loves that stray - Among her blossoms, and the golden time - Of the full ear and bounty of the boughs,-- - And the great hills and solemn chanting seas - And prodigal meadows, answering to the chime - Of God’s good year, and bearing on their brows - The glory of processional mysteries - From dawn to dawn, the woven leaves and light - Of the high noon, the twilight secrecies, - And the inscrutable wonder of the stars - Flung out along the reaches of the night. - - _And the ancient might_ - _Of the binding bars_ - _Waned as I woke to a new desire_ - _For the choric song_ - _Of exultant, strong_ - _Earth-passionate men with souls of fire._ - - -VI - - ’T was given me to hear. As I beheld-- - With a new wisdom, tranquil, asking not - For mystic revelation--this glory long forgot, - This re-discovered triumph of the earth - In high creative will and beauty’s pride - Establishèd beyond the assaulting years, - It came to me, a music that compelled - Surrender of all tributary fears, - Full-throated, fierce, and rhythmic with the wide - Beat of the pilgrim winds and labouring seas, - Sent up from all the harbouring ways of earth - Wherein the travelling feet of men have trod, - Mounting the firmamental silences - And challenging the golden gates of God. - - _We bear the burden of the years_ - _Clean limbed, clear-hearted, open-browed,_ - _Albeit sacramental tears_ - _Have dimmed our eyes, we know the proud_ - _Content of men who sweep unbowed_ - _Before the legionary fears;_ - _In sorrow we have grown to be_ - _The masters of adversity._ - - _Wise of the storied ages we,_ - _Of perils dared and crosses borne,_ - _Of heroes bound by no decree_ - _Of laws defiled or faiths outworn,_ - _Of poets who have held in scorn_ - _All mean and tyrannous things that be;_ - _We prophesy with lips that sped_ - _The songs of the prophetic dead._ - - _Wise of the brief belovèd span_ - _Of this our glad earth-travelling,_ - _Of beauty’s bloom and ordered plan,_ - _Of love and loves compassioning,_ - _Of all the dear delights that spring_ - _From man’s communion with man;_ - _We cherish every hour that strays_ - _Adown the cataract of the days._ - - _We see the clear untroubled skies,_ - _We see the summer of the rose_ - _And laugh, nor grieve that clouds will rise_ - _And wax with every wind that blows,_ - _Nor that the blossoming time will close,_ - _For beauty seen of humble eyes_ - _Immortal habitation has_ - _Though beauty’s form may pale and pass._ - - _Wise of the great unshapen age,_ - _To which we move with measured tread_ - _All girt with passionate truth to wage_ - _High battle for the word unsaid,_ - _The song unsung, the cause unled,_ - _The freedom that no hope can gauge;_ - _Strong-armed, sure-footed, iron-willed_ - _We sift and weave, we break and build._ - - _Into one hour we gather all_ - _The years gone down, the years unwrought_ - _Upon our ears brave measures fall_ - _Across uncharted spaces brought,_ - _Upon our lips the words are caught_ - _Wherewith the dead the unborn call;_ - _From love to love, from height to height_ - _We press and none may curb our might._ - - -VII - - O blessed voices, O compassionate hands, - Calling and healing, O great-hearted brothers! - I come to you. Ring out across the lands - Your benediction, and I too will sing - With you, and haply kindle in another’s - Dark desolate hour the flame you stirred in me. - O bountiful earth, in adoration meet - I bow to you; O glory of years to be, - I too will labour to your fashioning. - Go down, go down, unweariable feet, - Together we will march towards the ways - Wherein the marshalled hosts of morning wait - In sleepless watch, with banners wide unfurled - Across the skies in ceremonial state, - To greet the men who lived triumphant days, - And stormed the secret beauty of the world. - - - - -CHALLENGE - - - You fools behind the panes who peer - At the strong black anger of the sky, - Come out and feel the storm swing by, - Aye, take its blow on your lips, and hear - The wind in the branches cry. - - No. Leave us to the day’s device, - Draw to your blinds and take your ease, - Grow peak’d in the face and crook’d in the knees; - Your sinews could not pay the price - When the storm goes through the trees. - - - - -TRAVEL TALK - -LADYWOOD, 1912. (TO E. DE S.) - - - To the high hills you took me, where desire, - Daughter of difficult life, forgets her lures, - And hope’s eternal tasks no longer tire, - And only peace endures. - Where anxious prayer becomes a worthless thing - Subdued by muted praise, - And asking nought of God and life we bring - The conflict of long days - Into a moment of immortal poise - Among the scars and proud unbuilded spires, - Where, seeking not the triumphs and the joys - So treasured in the world, we kindle fires - That shall not burn to ash, and are content - To read anew the eternal argument. - - Nothing of man’s intolerance we know - Here, far from man, among the fortressed hills, - Nor of his querulous hopes. - To what may we attain? What matter, so - We feel the unwearied virtue that fulfils - These cloudy crests and rifts and heathered slopes - With life that is and seeks not to attain, - For ever spends nor ever asks again? - - To the high hills you took me. And we saw - The everlasting ritual of sky - And earth and the waste places of the air, - And momently the change of changeless law - Was beautiful before us, and the cry - Of the great winds was as a distant prayer - From a massed people, and the choric sound - Of many waters moaning down the long - Veins of the hills was as an undersong; - And in that hour we moved on holy ground. - - To the high hills you took me. Far below - Lay pool and tarn locked up in shadowy sleep; - Above we watched the clouds unhasting go - From hidden crest to crest; the neighbour sheep - Cropped at our side, and swift on darkling wings - The hawks went sailing down the valley wind, - The rock-bird chattered shrilly to its kind; - And all these common things were holy things. - - From ghostly Skiddaw came the wind in flight. - By Langdale Pikes to Coniston’s broad brow, - From Coniston to proud Helvellyn’s height, - The eloquent wind, the wind that even now - Whispers again its story gathered in - For seasons of much traffic in the ways - Where men so straitly spin - The garment of unfathomable days. - - To the high hills you took me. And we turned - Our feet again towards the friendly vale, - And passed the banks whereon the bracken burned - And the last foxglove bells were spent and pale, - Down to a hallowed spot of English land - Where Rotha dreams its way from mere to mere, - Where one with undistracted vision scanned - Life’s far horizons, he who sifted clear - Dust from the grain of being, making song - Memorial of simple men and minds - Not bowed to cunning by deliberate wrong, - And conversed with the spirit of the winds, - And knew the guarded secrets that were sealed - In pool and pine, petal and vagrant wing, - Throning the shepherd folding from the field, - Robing anew the daffodils of spring. - - We crossed the threshold of his home and stood - Beside his cottage hearth where once was told - The day’s adventure drawn from fell and wood, - And wisdom’s words and love’s were manifold, - Where, in the twilight, gossip poets met - To read again their peers of older time, - And quiet eyes of gracious women set - A bounty to the glamour of the rhyme. - - There is a wonder in a simple word - That reinhabits fond and ghostly ways, - And when within the poet’s walls we heard - One white with ninety years recall the days - When he upon his mountain paths was seen, - We answered her strange bidding and were made - One with the reverend presence who had been - Steward of kingly charges unbetrayed. - - And to the little garden-close we went, - Where he at eventide was wont to pass - To watch the willing day’s last sacrament, - And the cool shadows thrown along the grass, - To read again the legends of the flowers, - Lighten with song th’ obscure heroic plan, - To contemplate the process of the hours, - And think on that old story which is man. - The lichened apple-boughs that once had spent - Their blossoms at his feet, in twisted age - Yet knew the wind, and the familiar scent - Of heath and fern made sweet his hermitage. - And, moving so beneath his cottage-eaves, - His song upon our lips, his life a star, - A sign, a storied peace among the leaves, - Was he not with us then? He was not far. - - To the high hills you took me. We had seen - Much marvellous traffic in the cloudy ways, - Had laughed with the white waters and the green, - Had praised and heard the choric chant of praise, - Communed anew with the undying dead, - Resung old songs, retold old fabulous things, - And, stripped of pride, had lost the world and led - A world refashioned as unconquered kings. - - And the good day was done, and there again - Where in your home of quietness we stood, - Far from the sight and sound of travelling men, - And watched the twilight climb from Lady-wood - Above the pines, above the visible streams, - Beyond the hidden sources of the rills, - Bearing the season of uncharted dreams - Into the silent fastness of the hills. - - Peace on the hills, and in the valleys peace; - And Rotha’s moaning music sounding clear; - The passing-song of wearied winds that cease, - Moving among the reeds of Rydal Mere; - The distant gloom of boughs that still unscarred - Beside their poet’s grave due vigil keep-- - With us were these, till night was throned and starred - And bade us to the benison of sleep. - - - - -THE VAGABOND - - - I know the pools where the grayling rise, - I know the trees where the filberts fall, - I know the woods where the red fox lies, - The twisted elms where the brown owls call. - And I’ve seldom a shilling to call my own, - And there’s never a girl I’d marry, - I thank the Lord I’m a rolling stone - With never a care to carry. - - I talk to the stars as they come and go - On every night from July to June, - I’m free of the speech of the winds that blow, - And I know what weather will sing what tune. - I sow no seed and I pay no rent, - And I thank no man for his bounties, - But I’ve a treasure that’s never spent, - I’m lord of a dozen counties. - - - - -OLD WOMAN IN MAY - - - “Old woman by the hedgerow - In gown of withered black, - With beads and pins and buttons - And ribbons in your pack-- - How many miles do you go? - To Dumbleton and back?” - - “To Dumbleton and back, sir, - And round by Cotsall Hill, - I count the miles at morning, - At night I count them still, - A Jill without a Jack, sir, - I travel with a will.” - - “It’s little men are paying - For such as you can do, - You with the grey dust in your hair - And sharp nails in your shoe, - The young folks go a-Maying, - But what is May to you?” - - “I care not what they pay me - While I can hear the call - Of cattle on the hillside, - And watch the blossoms fall - In a churchyard where maybe - There’s company for all.” - - - - -THE FECKENHAM MEN - - - The jolly men at Feckenham - Don’t count their goods as common men, - Their heads are full of silly dreams - From half-past ten to half-past ten, - They’ll tell you why the stars are bright, - And some sheep black and some sheep white. - - The jolly men at Feckenham - Draw wages of the sun and rain, - And count as good as golden coin - The blossoms on the window-pane, - And Lord! they love a sinewy tale - Told over pots of foaming ale. - - Now here’s a tale of Feckenham - Told to me by a Feckenham man, - Who, being only eighty years, - Ran always when the red fox ran, - And looked upon the earth with eyes - As quiet as unclouded skies. - - These jolly men of Feckenham - One day when summer strode in power - Went down, it seems, among their lands - And saw their bean fields all in flower-- - “Wheat-ricks,” they said, “be good to see; - What would a rick of blossoms be?” - - So straight they brought the sickles out - And worked all day till day was done, - And builded them a good square rick - Of scented bloom beneath the sun. - And was not this I tell to you - A fiery-hearted thing to do? - - - - -THE TRAVELLER - - - When March was master of furrow and fold, - And the skies kept cloudy festival - And the daffodil pods were tipped with gold - And a passion was in the plover’s call, - A spare old man went hobbling by - With a broken pipe and a tapping stick, - And he mumbled--“Blossom before I die, - Be quick, you little brown buds, be quick. - - “I ’ve weathered the world for a count of years-- - Good old years of shining fire-- - And death and the devil bring no fears, - And I ’ve fed the flame of my last desire; - I ’m ready to go, but I ’d pass the gate - On the edge of the world with an old heart sick - If I missed the blossoms. I may not wait-- - The gate is open--be quick, be quick.” - - - - -IN LADY STREET - - - All day long the traffic goes - In Lady Street by dingy rows - Of sloven houses, tattered shops-- - Fried fish, old clothes and fortune-tellers-- - Tall trams on silver-shining rails, - With grinding wheels and swaying tops, - And lorries with their corded bales, - And screeching cars. “Buy, buy!” the sellers - Of rags and bones and sickening meat - Cry all day long in Lady Street. - - And when the sunshine has its way - In Lady Street, then all the grey - Dull desolation grows in state - More dull and grey and desolate, - And the sun is a shamefast thing, - A lord not comely-housed, a god - Seeing what gods must blush to see, - A song where it is ill to sing, - And each gold ray despiteously - Lies like a gold ironic rod. - - Yet one grey man in Lady Street - Looks for the sun. He never bent - Life to his will, his travelling feet - Have scaled no cloudy continent, - Nor has the sickle-hand been strong. - He lives in Lady Street; a bed, - Four cobwebbed walls. - - But all day long - A time is singing in his head - Of youth in Gloucester lanes. He hears - The wind among the barley-blades, - The tapping of the woodpeckers - On the smooth beeches, thistle-spades - Slicing the sinewy roots; he sees - The hooded filberts in the copse - Beyond the loaded orchard trees, - The netted avenues of hops; - He smells the honeysuckle thrown - Along the hedge. He lives alone, - Alone--yet not alone, for sweet - Are Gloucester lanes in Lady Street. - - Aye, Gloucester lanes. For down below - The cobwebbed room this grey man plies - A trade, a coloured trade. A show - Of many-coloured merchandise - Is in his shop. Brown filberts there, - And apples red with Gloucester air, - And cauliflowers he keeps, and round - Smooth marrows grown on Gloucester ground, - Fat cabbages and yellow plums, - And gaudy brave chrysanthemums. - And times a glossy pheasant lies - Among his store, not Tyrian dyes - More rich than are the neck-feathers; - And times a prize of violets, - Or dewy mushrooms satin-skinned - And times an unfamiliar wind - Robbed of its woodland favour stirs - Gay daffodils this grey man sets - Among his treasure. - - All day long - In Lady Street the traffic goes - By dingy houses, desolate rows - Of shops that stare like hopeless eyes. - Day long the sellers cry their cries, - The fortune-tellers tell no wrong - Of lives that know not any right, - And drift, that has not even the will - To drift, toils through the day until - The wage of sleep is won at night. - But this grey man heeds not at all - The hell of Lady Street. His stall - Of many-coloured merchandise - He makes a shining paradise, - As all day long chrysanthemums - He sells, and red and yellow plums - And cauliflowers. In that one spot - Of Lady Street the sun is not - Ashamed to shine and send a rare - Shower of colour through the air; - The grey man says the sun is sweet - On Gloucester lanes in Lady Street. - - - - -ANTHONY CRUNDLE - - - CENTER - _Here lies the body of - ANTHONY CRUNDLE, - Farmer, of this parish, - Who died in 1849 at the age of 82. - “He delighted in music.” - R. I. P. - And of - SUSAN, - For fifty-three years his wife, - Who died in 1860, aged 86._ - - ANTHONY CRUNDLE of Dorrington Wood - Played on a piccolo. Lord was he, - For seventy years, of sheaves that stood - Under the perry and cider tree; - _Anthony Crundle, R.I.P._ - - And because he prospered with sickle and scythe, - With cattle afield and labouring ewe, - Anthony was uncommonly blithe, - And played of a night to himself and Sue; - _Anthony Crundle, eighty-two_. - - The earth to till, and a tune to play, - And Susan for fifty years and three, - And Dorrington Wood at the end of day ... - May providence do no worse by me; - _Anthony Crundle, R.I.P._ - - - - -MAD TOM TATTERMAN - - - “Old man, grey man, good man scavenger, - Bearing is it eighty years upon your crumpled back? - What is it you gather in the frosty weather, - Is there any treasure here to carry in your sack?” - - * * * * * - - “I’ve a million acres and a thousand head of cattle, - And a foaming river where the silver salmon leap; - But I’ve left fat valleys to dig in sullen alleys - Just because a twisted star rode by me in my sleep. - - “I’ve a brain is dancing to an old forgotten music - Heard when all the world was just a crazy flight of dreams, - And don’t you know I scatter in the dirt along the gutter - Seeds that little ladies nursed by Babylonian streams? - - “Mad Tom Tatterman, that is how they call me. - Oh, they know so much, so much, all so neatly dressed; - I’ve a tale to tell you--come and listen, will you?-- - One as ragged as the twigs that make a magpie’s nest. - - “Ragged, oh, but very wise. You and this and that man, - All of you are making things that none of you would lack, - And so your eyes grow dusty, and so your limbs grow rusty-- - But mad Tom Tatterman puts nothing in his sack. - - “Nothing in my sack, sirs, but the Sea of Galilee - Was walked for mad Tom Tatterman, and when I go to sleep - They’ll know that I have driven through the acres of broad heaven - Flocks are whiter than the flocks that all your shepherds keep.” - - - - -FOR CORIN TO-DAY - - - Old shepherd in your wattle cote, - I think a thousand years are done - Since first you took your pipe of oat - And piped against the risen sun, - Until his burning lips of gold - Sucked up the drifting scarves of dew - And bade you count your flocks from fold - And set your hurdle stakes anew. - - And then as now at noon you ’ld take - The shadow of delightful trees, - And with good hands of labour break - Your barley bread with dairy cheese, - And with some lusty shepherd mate - Would wind a simple argument, - And bear at night beyond your gate - A loaded wallet of content. - - O Corin of the grizzled eye, - A thousand years upon your down - You’ve seen the ploughing teams go by - Above the bells of Avon’s town; - And while there’s any wind to blow - Through frozen February nights, - About your lambing pens will go - The glimmer of your lanthorn lights. - - - - -THE CARVER IN STONE - - - He was a man with wide and patient eyes, - Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June - That, without fearing, searched if any wrong - Might threaten from your heart. Grey eyes he had - Under a brow was drawn because he knew - So many seasons to so many pass - Of upright service, loyal, unabased - Before the world seducing, and so, barren - Of good words praising and thought that mated his. - He carved in stone. Out of his quiet life - He watched as any faithful seaman charged - With tidings of the myriad faring sea, - And thoughts and premonitions through his mind - Sailing as ships from strange and storied lands - His hungry spirit held, till all they were - Found living witness in the chiselled stone. - Slowly out of the dark confusion, spread - By life’s innumerable venturings - Over his brain, he would triumph into the light - Of one clear mood, unblemished of the blind - Legions of errant thought that cried about - His rapt seclusion: as a pearl unsoiled, - Nay, rather washed to lonelier chastity, - In gritty mud. And then would come a bird, - A flower, or the wind moving upon a flower, - A beast at pasture, or a clustered fruit, - A peasant face as were the saints of old, - The leer of custom, or the bow of the moon - Swung in miraculous poise--some stray from the world - Of things created by the eternal mind - In joy articulate. And his perfect mood - Would dwell about the token of God’s mood, - Until in bird or flower or moving wind - Or flock or shepherd or the troops of heaven - It sprang in one fierce moment of desire - To visible form. - Then would his chisel work among the stone, - Persuading it of petal or of limb - Or starry curve, till risen anew there sang - Shape out of chaos, and again the vision - Of one mind single from the world was pressed - Upon the daily custom of the sky - Or field or the body of man. - - His people - Had many gods for worship. The tiger-god, - The owl, the dewlapped bull, the running pard, - The camel and the lizard of the slime, - The ram with quivering fleece and fluted horn, - The crested eagle and the doming bat - Were sacred. And the king and his high priests - Decreed a temple, wide on columns huge, - Should top the cornlands to the sky’s far line. - They bade the carvers carve along the walls - Images of their gods, each one to carve - As he desired, his choice to name his god.... - And many came; and he among them, glad - Of three leagues’ travel through the singing air - Of dawn among the boughs yet bare of green, - The eager flight of the spring leading his blood - Into swift lofty channels of the air, - Proud as an eagle riding to the sun.... - An eagle, clean of pinion--there’s his choice. - - Daylong they worked under the growing roof, - One at his leopard, one the staring ram, - And he winning his eagle from the stone, - Until each man had carved one image out, - Arow beyond the portal of the house. - They stood arow, the company of gods, - Camel and bat, lizard and bull and ram, - The pard and owl, dead figures on the wall, - Figures of habit driven on the stone - By chisels governed by no heat of the brain - But drudges of hands that moved by easy rule. - Proudly recorded mood was none, no thought - Plucked from the dark battalions of the mind - And throned in everlasting sight. But one - God of them all was witness of belief - And large adventure dared. His eagle spread - Wide pinions on a cloudless ground of heaven, - Glad with the heart’s high courage of that dawn - Moving upon the ploughlands newly sown, - Dead stone the rest. He looked, and knew it so. - - Then came the king with priests and counsellors - And many chosen of the people, wise - With words weary of custom, and eyes askew - That watched their neighbour face for any news - Of the best way of judgment, till, each sure - None would determine with authority, - All spoke in prudent praise. One liked the owl - Because an owl blinked on the beam of his barn. - One, hoarse with crying gospels in the street, - Praised most the ram, because the common folk - Wore breeches made of ram’s wool. One declared - The tiger pleased him best,--the man who carved - The tiger-god was halt out of the womb-- - A man to praise, being so pitiful. - And one, whose eyes dwelt in a distant void, - With spell and omen pat upon his lips, - And a purse for any crystal prophet ripe, - A zealot of the mist, gazed at the bull-- - A lean ill-shapen bull of meagre lines - That scarce the steel had graved upon the stone-- - Saying that here was very mystery - And truth, did men but know. And one there was - Who praised his eagle, but remembering - The lither pinion of the swift, the curve - That liked him better of the mirrored swan. - And they who carved the tiger-god and ram, - The camel and the pard, the owl and bull, - And lizard, listened greedily, and made - Humble denial of their worthiness, - And when the king his royal judgment gave - That all had fashioned well, and bade that each - Re-shape his chosen god along the walls - Till all the temple boasted of their skill, - They bowed themselves in token that as this - Never had carvers been so fortunate. - - Only the man with wide and patient eyes - Made no denial, neither bowed his head. - Already while they spoke his thought had gone - Far from his eagle, leaving it for a sign - Loyally wrought of one deep breath of life, - And played about the image of a toad - That crawled among his ivy leaves. A queer - Puff-bellied toad, with eyes that always stared - Sidelong at heaven and saw no heaven there, - Weak-hammed, and with a throttle somehow twisted - Beyond full wholesome draughts of air, and skin - Of wrinkled lips, the only zest or will - The little flashing tongue searching the leaves. - And king and priest, chosen and counsellor, - Babbling out of their thin and jealous brains, - Seemed strangely one; a queer enormous toad - Panting under giant leaves of dark, - Sunk in the loins, peering into the day. - Their judgment wry he counted not for wrong - More than the fabled poison of the toad - Striking at simple wits; how should their thought - Or word in praise or blame come near the peace - That shone in seasonable hours above - The patience of his spirit’s husbandry? - They foolish and not seeing, how should he - Spend anger there or fear--great ceremonies - Equal for none save great antagonists? - The grave indifference of his heart before them - Was moved by laughter innocent of hate, - Chastising clean of spite, that moulded them - Into the antic likeness of his toad - Bidding for laughter underneath the leaves. - - He bowed not, nor disputed, but he saw - Those ill-created joyless gods, and loathed, - And saw them creeping, creeping round the walls, - Death breeding death, wile witnessing to wile, - And sickened at the dull iniquity - Should be rewarded, and for ever breathe - Contagion on the folk gathered in prayer. - His truth should not be doomed to march among - This falsehood to the ages. He was called, - And he must labour there; if so the king - Would grant it, where the pillars bore the roof - A galleried way of meditation nursed - Secluded time, with wall of ready stone - In panels for the carver set between - The windows--there his chisel should be set,-- - It was his plea. And the king spoke of him, - Scorning, as one lack-fettle, among all these - Eager to take the riches of renown; - One fearful of the light or knowing nothing - Of light’s dimension, a witling who would throw - Honour aside and praise spoken aloud - All men of heart should covet. Let him go - Grubbing out of the sight of these who knew - The worth of substance; there was his proper trade. - - A squat and curious toad indeed.... The eyes, - Patient and grey, were dumb as were the lips, - That, fixed and governed, hoarded from them all - The larger laughter lifting in his heart. - Straightway about his gallery he moved, - Measured the windows and the virgin stone, - Till all was weighed and patterned in his brain. - Then first where most the shadow struck the wall, - Under the sills, and centre of the base, - From floor to sill out of the stone was wooed - Memorial folly, as from the chisel leapt - His chastening laughter searching priest and king-- - A huge and wrinkled toad, with legs asplay, - And belly loaded, leering with great eyes - Busily fixed upon the void. - All days - His chisel was the first to ring across - The temple’s quiet; and at fall of dusk - Passing among the carvers homeward, they - Would speak of him as mad, or weak against - The challenge of the world, and let him go - Lonely, as was his will, under the night - Of stars or cloud or summer’s folded sun, - Through crop and wood and pastureland to sleep. - None took the narrow stair as wondering - How did his chisel prosper in the stone, - Unvisited his labour and forgot. - And times when he would lean out of his height - And watch the gods growing along the walls, - The row of carvers in their linen coats - Took in his vision a virtue that alone - Carving they had not nor the thing they carved. - Knowing the health that flowed about his close - Imagining, the daily quiet won - From process of his clean and supple craft, - Those carvers there, far on the floor below, - Would haply be transfigured in his thought - Into a gallant company of men - Glad of the strict and loyal reckoning - That proved in the just presence of the brain - Each chisel-stroke. How surely would he prosper - In pleasant talk at easy hours with men - So fashioned if it might be--and his eyes - Would pass again to those dead gods that grew - In spreading evil round the temple walls; - And, one dead pressure made, the carvers moved - Along the wall to mould and mould again - The self-same god, their chisels on the stone - Tapping in dull precision as before, - And he would turn, back to his lonely truth. - - He carved apace. And first his people’s gods, - About the toad, out of their sterile time, - Under his hand thrilled and were recreate. - The bull, the pard, the camel and the ram, - Tiger and owl and bat--all were the signs - Visibly made body on the stone - Of sightless thought adventuring the host - That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved - By secret labour in the flowing wood - Of rain and air and wind and continent sun.... - His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone, - A swift destruction for a moment leashed, - Sprang crying from the jealous stealth of men - Opposed in cunning watch, with engines hid - Of torment and calamitous desire. - His leopard, swift on lean and paltry limbs, - Was fear in flight before accusing faith. - His bull, with eyes that often in the dusk - Would lift from the sweet meadow grass to watch - Him homeward passing, bore on massy beam - The burden of the patient of the earth. - His camel bore the burden of the damned, - Being gaunt, with eyes aslant along the nose. - He had a friend, who hammered bronze and iron - And cupped the moonstone on a silver ring, - One constant like himself, would come at night - Or bid him as a guest, when they would make - Their poets touch a starrier height, or search - Together with unparsimonious mind - The crowded harbours of mortality. - And there were jests, wholesome as harvest ale - Of homely habit, bred of hearts that dared - Judgment of laughter under the eternal eye: - This frolic wisdom was his carven owl. - His ram was lordship on the lonely hills, - Alert and fleet, content only to know - The wind mightily pouring on his fleece, - With yesterday and all unrisen suns - Poorer than disinherited ghosts. His bat - Was ancient envy made a mockery, - Cowering below the newer eagle carved - Above the arches with wide pinion spread, - His faith’s dominion of that happy dawn. - - And so he wrought the gods upon the wall, - Living and crying out of his desire, - Out of his patient incorruptible thought, - Wrought them in joy was wages to his faith. - And other than the gods he made. The stalks - Of bluebells heavy with the news of spring, - The vine loaded with plenty of the year, - And swallows, merely tenderness of thought - Bidding the stone to small and fragile flight; - Leaves, the thin relics of autumnal boughs, - Or massed in June.... - All from their native pressure bloomed and sprang - Under his shaping hand into a proud - And governed image of the central man,-- - Their moulding, charts of all his travelling. - And all were deftly ordered, duly set - Between the windows, underneath the sills, - And roofward, as a motion rightly planned, - Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone, - A glory blazed, his vision manifest, - His wonder captive. And he was content. - - And when the builders and the carvers knew - Their labour done, and high the temple stood - Over the cornlands, king and counsellor - And priest and chosen of the people came - Among a ceremonial multitude - To dedication. And, below the thrones - Where king and archpriest ruled above the throng, - Highest among the ranked artificers - The carvers stood. And when, the temple vowed - To holy use, tribute and choral praise - Given as was ordained, the king looked down - Upon the gathered folk, and bade them see - The comely gods fashioned about the walls, - And keep in honour men whose precious skill - Could so adorn the sessions of their worship, - Gravely the carvers bowed them to the ground. - Only the man with wide and patient eyes - Stood not among them; nor did any come - To count his labour, where he watched alone - Above the coloured throng. He heard, and looked - Again upon his work, and knew it good, - Smiled on his toad, passed down the stair unseen - And sang across the teeming meadows home. - - - - -ELIZABETH ANN - - - This is the tale of Elizabeth Ann, - Who went away with her fancy man. - - Ann was a girl who hadn’t a gown - As fine as the ladies who walk the town. - - All day long from seven to six - Ann was polishing candlesticks, - - For Bishops and crapulous Millionaires - To buy for their altars or bed-chambers. - - And youth in a year and a year will pass, - But there’s never an end of polishing brass. - - All day long from seven to six-- - Seventy thousand candlesticks. - - So frail and lewd Elizabeth Ann - Went away with her fancy man. - - You Bishops and crapulous Millionaires, - Give her your charity, give her your prayers. - - - - -THE COTSWOLD FARMERS - - - Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go - Along the hill-top way, - And with long scythes of silver mow - Meadows of moonlit hay, - Until the cocks of Cotswold crow - The coming of the day. - - There’s Tony Turkletob who died - When he could drink no more, - And Uncle Heritage, the pride - Of eighteen-twenty-four, - And Ebenezer Barleytide, - And others half a score. - - They fold in phantom pens, and plough - Furrows without a share, - And one will milk a faery cow, - And one will stare and stare, - And whistle ghostly tunes that now - Are not sung anywhere. - - The moon goes down on Oakridge lea, - The other world’s astir, - The Cotswold farmers silently - Go back to sepulchre, - The sleeping watchdogs wake, and see - No ghostly harvester. - - - - -A MAN’S DAUGHTER - - - There is an old woman who looks each night - Out of the wood. - She has one tooth, that isn’t too white. - She isn’t too good. - - She came from the north looking for me, - About my jewel. - Her son, she says, is tall as can be; - But, men say, cruel. - - My girl went northward, holiday making, - And a queer man spoke - At the woodside once when night was breaking, - And her heart broke. - - For ever since she has pined and pined, - A sorry maid; - Her fingers are slack as the wool they wind, - Or her girdle-braid. - - So now shall I send her north to wed, - Who here may know - Only the little house of the dead - To ease her woe? - - Or keep her for fear of that old woman, - As a bird quick-eyed, - And her tall son who is hardly human, - At the woodside? - - She is my babe and my daughter dear, - How well, how well. - Her grief to me is a fourfold fear, - Tongue cannot tell. - - And yet I know that far in that wood - Are crumbling bones, - And a mumble mumble of nothing that’s good, - In heathen tones. - - And I know that frail ghosts flutter and sigh - In brambles there, - And never a bird or beast to cry-- - Beware, beware,-- - - While threading the silent thickets go - Mother and son, - Where scrupulous berries never grow, - And airs are none. - - And her deep eyes peer at eventide - Out of the wood, - And her tall son waits by the dark woodside - For maidenhood. - - And the little eyes peer, and peer, and peer; - And a word is said. - And some house knows, for many a year, - But years of dread. - - - - -THE LIFE OF JOHN HERITAGE - - - Born in the Cotswolds in eighteen-forty or so, - Bred on a hill-top that seemed the most of the world - Until he travelled the valleys, and found what a wonder - Of leagues from Gloucester lay to Stroud or Ciceter, - John Heritage was a tiler. He split the stone, - After the frosts, and learnt the laying of tiles, - And was famous about the shire. And he was friendly - With Cotswold nature, hearing the hidden rooks - In Golden Vale, and the thin bleat of goats, - And the rattling harness of Trilly’s teams at plough, - And Richard Parker’s scythe for many years, - As he went upon his tiling; and the great landmarks, - As loops of the Severn seen from Bisley Hill, - Were his familiars, something of his religion. - - And he prospered, as men do. His little wage - Yet left a little over his wedded needs, - And here a cottage he bought, and there another, - About the Cotswolds, built of the royallest stone - That’s quarried in England, until he could think of age - With an easy mind; and an acre of land was his - Where at hay-harvest he worked a little from tiling, - Making his rick maturely or damning the wind - That scattered the swathes beyond his fork’s controlling. - And he trotted ajog to the town on market Thursdays, - Driving a stout succession of good black geldings, - That cropped his acre some twenty years apiece. - And he was an honest neighbour; and so he grew old, - And five strong sons, grizzled and middle-aged, - Carried him down the hill, and on a stone - The mason cut--“John Heritage, who died, - Fearing the Lord, at the age of seventy-six.” - - And I know that some of us shatter our hearts on earth, - With mightier aims than ever John Heritage knew, - And think such things as never the tiler thought, - Because of our pride and our eagerness of mind ... - But a life complete is a great nobility, - And there’s a wisdom biding in Cotswold stone, - While we in our furious intellectual travel - Fall in with strange foot-fellows on the road. - - - - -THOMAS YARNTON OF TARLTON - - - One of those old men fearing no man, - Two hundred broods his eaves have known - Since they cut on a Sapperton churchyard stone-- - “Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton, Yeoman.” - - At dusk you can hear the yeomen calling - The cattle still to Sapperton stalls, - And still the stroke of the woodman falls - As Thomas of Tarlton heard it falling. - - I walked these meadows in seventeen-hundred, - Seed of his loins, a dream that stirred - Beyond the shape of a yeoman’s word, - So faint that but unawares he wondered. - - And now, from the weeds of his tomb uncomely, - I travel again the tracks he made, - And walks at my side the yeoman shade - Of Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton dumbly. - - - - -MRS. WILLOW - - - Mrs. Thomas Willow seems very glum. - Her life, perhaps, is very lonely and hum-drum, - Digging up potatoes, cleaning out the weeds, - Doing the little for a lone woman’s needs. - Who was her husband? How long ago? - What does she wonder? What does she know? - Why does she listen over the wall, - Morning and noon-time and twilight and all, - As though unforgotten were some footfall? - - “Good morning, Mrs. Willow.” “Good morning, sir,” - Is all the conversation I can get from her. - And her path-stones are white as lilies of the wood, - And she washes this and that till she must be very good. - She sends no letters, and no one calls, - And she doesn’t go whispering beyond her walls; - Nothing in her garden is secret, I think-- - That’s all sun-bright with foxglove and pink, - And she doesn’t hover around old cupboards and shelves - As old people do who have buried themselves; - She has no late lamps, and she digs all day - And polishes and plants in a common way, - But glum she is, and she listens now and then - For a footfall, a footfall, a footfall again, - And whether it’s hope, or whether it’s dread, - Or a poor old fancy in her head, - I shall never be told; it will never be said. - - - - -ROUNDELS OF THE YEAR - - - _I caught the changes of the year_ - _In soft and fragile nets of song,_ - _For you to whom my days belong._ - - _For you to whom each day is dear_ - _Of all the high processional throng,_ - _I caught the changes of the year_ - _In soft and fragile nets of song._ - - _And here some sound of beauty, here_ - _Some note of ancient, ageless wrong_ - _Reshaping as my lips were strong,_ - _I caught the changes of the year_ - _In soft and fragile nets of song,_ - _For you to whom my days belong._ - - -I - - The spring is passing through the land - In web of ghostly green arrayed, - And blood is warm in man and maid. - - The arches of desire have spanned - The barren ways, the debt is paid, - The spring is passing through the land - In web of ghostly green arrayed. - - Sweet scents along the winds are fanned - From shadowy wood and secret glade - Where beauty blossoms unafraid, - The spring is passing through the land - In web of ghostly green arrayed - And blood is warm in man and maid. - - -II - - Proud insolent June with burning lips - Holds riot now from sea to sea, - And shod in sovran gold is she. - - To the full flood of reaping slips - The seeding-tide by God’s decree, - Proud insolent June with burning lips - Holds riot now from sea to sea. - - And all the goodly fellowships - Of bird and bloom and beast and tree - Are gallant of her company-- - Proud insolent June with burning lips - Holds riot now from sea to sea, - And shod in sovran gold is she. - - -III - - The loaded sheaves are harvested, - The sheep are in the stubbled fold, - The tale of labour crowned is told. - - The wizard of the year has spread - A glory over wood and wold, - The loaded sheaves are harvested, - The sheep are in the stubbled fold. - - The yellow apples and the red - Bear down the boughs, the hazels hold - No more their fruit in cups of gold. - The loaded sheaves are harvested, - The sheep are in the stubbled fold, - The tale of labour crowned is told. - - -IV - - The year is lapsing into time - Along a deep and songless gloom, - Unchapleted of leaf or bloom. - - And mute between the dusk and prime - The diligent earth resets her loom,-- - The year is lapsing into time - Along a deep and songless gloom. - - While o’er the snows the seasons chime - Their golden hopes to reillume - The brief eclipse about the tomb, - The year is lapsing into time - Along a deep and songless gloom - Unchapleted of leaf or bloom. - - -V - - _Not wise as cunning scholars are,_ - _With curious words upon your tongue,_ - _Are you for whom my song is sung._ - - _But you are wise of cloud and star,_ - _And winds and boughs all blossom-hung,_ - _Not wise as cunning scholars are,_ - _With curious words upon your tongue._ - - _Surely, clear child of earth, some far_ - _Dim Dryad-haunted groves among,_ - _Your lips to lips of knowledge clung--_ - _Not wise as cunning scholars are,_ - _With curious words upon your tongue,_ - _Are you for whom my song is sung._ - - - - -LIEGEWOMAN - - - You may not wear immortal leaves - Nor yet go laurelled in your days, - But he believes - Who loves you with most intimate praise - That none on earth has ever gone, - In whom a cleanlier spirit shone. - - You may be unremembered when - Our chronicles are piled in dust: - No matter than-- - None ever bore a lordlier lust - To know the savour sweet or sour - Down to the dregs of every hour. - - And this your epitaph shall be-- - “Within life’s house her eager words - Continually - Lightened as wings of arrowy birds: - She was life’s house-fellow, she knew - The passion of him, soul and thew.” - - - - -LOVERS TO LOVERS - - - Our love forsworn - Was very love upon a day, - Bitterness now, forlorn, - This tattered love once went as proud a way - As any born. - - You well have kept - Your love from all corrupting things, - Your house of love is swept - And bright for use; whatso each season brings - You may accept - - In pride. But we? - Our date of love is dead. Our blind - Brief moment was to be - The sum, yet was it signed as yours, and signed - Indelibly. - - - - -LOVE’S PERSONALITY - - - If I had never seen - Thy sweet grave face, - If I had never known - Thy pride as of a queen, - Yet would another’s grace - Have led me to her throne. - - I should have loved as well - Not loving thee, - My faith had been as strong - Wrought by another spell; - Her love had grown to be - As thine for fire and song. - - Yet is our love a thing - Alone, austere, - A new and sacred birth - That we alone could bring - Through flames of faith and fear - To pass upon the earth. - - As one who makes a rhyme - Of his fierce thought, - With momentary art - May challenge change and time, - So is the love we wrought - Not greatest, but apart. - - - - -PIERROT - - - _Pierrot alone,_ - _And then Pierrette,_ - _And then a story to forget._ - - _Pierrot alone._ - Pierrette among the apple boughs - Come down and take a Pierrot’s kiss, - The moon is white upon your brows, - Pierrette among the apple boughs, - Your lips are cold, and I would set - A rose upon your lips, Pierrette, - A rosy kiss, - Pierrette, Pierrette. - - _And then Pierrette._ - I’ve left my apple boughs, Pierrot, - A shadow now is on my face, - But still my lips are cold, and O - No rose is on my lips, Pierrot, - You laugh, and then you pass away - Among the scented leaves of May, - And on my face - The shadows stay. - - _And then a story to forget._ - The petals fall upon the grass, - And I am crying in the dark, - The clouds above the white moon pass-- - My tears are falling on the grass; - Pierrot, Pierrot, I heard your vows - And left my blossomed apple boughs, - And sorrows dark - Are on my brows. - - - - -RECKONING - - - I heard my love go laughing - Beyond the bolted door, - I saw my love go riding - Across the windy moor, - And I would give my love no word - Because of evil tales I heard. - - Let fancy men go laughing, - Let light men ride away, - Bruised corn is not for my mill, - What’s paid I will not pay,-- - And so I thought because of this - Gossip that poisoned clasp and kiss. - - Four hundred men went riding, - And he the best of all, - A jolly man for labour, - A sinewy man and tall; - I watched him go beyond the hill, - And shaped my anger with my will. - - At night my love came riding - Across the dusky moor, - And other two rode with him - Who knocked my bolted door, - And called me out and bade me see - How quiet a man a man could be. - - And now the tales that stung me - And gave my pride its rule, - Are worth a beggar’s broken shoe - Or the sermon of a fool, - And all I know and all I can - Is, false or true, he was my man. - - - - -DERELICT - - - The cloudy peril of the seas, - The menace of mid-winter days, - May break the scented boughs of ease - And lock the lips of praise, - But every sea its harbour knows, - And every winter wakes to spring, - And every broken song the rose - Shall yet resing. - - But comfortable love once spent - May not re-shape its broken trust, - Or find anew the old content, - Dishonoured in the dust; - No port awaits those tattered sails, - No sun rides high above that gloom, - Unchronicled those half-told tales - Shall time entomb. - - - - -WED - - - I married him on Christmas morn,-- - Ah woe betide, ah woe betide, - Folk said I was a comely bride,-- - Ah me forlorn. - - All braided was my golden hair, - And heavy then, and shining then, - My limbs were sweet to madden men,-- - O cunning snare. - - My beauty was a thing they say - Of large renown,--O dread renown,-- - Its rumour travelled through the town, - Alas the day. - - His kisses burn my mouth and brows,-- - O burning kiss, O barren kiss,-- - My body for his worship is, - And so he vows. - - But daily many men draw near - With courtly speech and subtle speech; - I gather from the lips of each - A deadly fear. - - As he grows sullen I grow cold, - And whose the blame? Not mine the blame; - Their passions round me as a flame - All fiercely fold. - - And oh, to think that he might be - So proudly set, above them set, - If he might but awaken yet - The soul of me. - - Will no man seek and seeking find - The soul of me, the soul of me? - Nay, even as they are, so is he, - And all are blind. - - On Christmas morning we were wed, - Ah me the morn, the luckless morn; - Now poppies burn along the corn, - Would I were dead. - - - - -FORSAKEN - - - The word is said, and I no more shall know - Aught of the changing story of her days, - Nor any treasure that her lips bestow. - - And I, who loving her was wont to praise - All things in love, now reft of music go - With silent step down unfrequented ways. - - My soul is like a lonely market-place, - Where late were laughing folk and shining steeds - And many things of comeliness and grace; - - And now between the stones are twisting weeds, - No sound there is, nor any friendly face, - Save for a bedesman telling o’er his beads. - - - - -DEFIANCE - - - O wide the way your beauty goes, - For all its feigned indifference, - And every folly’s path it knows, - And every humour of pretence. - - But I can be as false as are - The rainbow loves which are your days, - And I will gladly go and far, - Content with your immediate praise. - - Your lips, the shyer lover’s bane, - I take with disputation none, - And am your kinsman in disdain - When all is excellently done. - - - - -LOVE IN OCTOBER - - - The fields, the clouds, the farms and farming gear, - The drifting kine, the scarlet apple trees ... - Not of the sun but separate are these, - And individual joys, and very dear; - Yet when the sun is folded, they are here - No more, the drifting skies: the argosies - Of wagoned apples: still societies - Of elms: red cattle on the stubbled year. - - So are you not love’s whole estate. I owe - In many hearts more dues than I shall pay; - Yet is your heart the spring of all love’s light, - And should your love weary of me and go - With all its thriving beams out of my day, - These many loves would founder in that night. - - - - -TO THE LOVERS THAT COME AFTER US - - - Lovers, a little of this your happy time - Give to the thought of us who were as you, - That we, whose dearest passion in your prime - Is but a winter garment, may renew - Our love in yours, our flesh in your desire, - Our tenderness in your discovering kiss, - For we are half the fuel of your fire, - As ours was fed by Marc and Beatrice. - Remember us, and, when you too are dead, - Our prayer with yours shall fall upon love’s spring - That all our ghostly loves be comforted - In those yet later lover’s love-making; - So shall oblivion bring his dust to spill - On brain and limbs, and we be lovers still. - - - - -DERBYSHIRE SONG - - - Come loving me to Darley Dale - In spring time or sickle time, - And we will make as proud a tale - As lovers in the antique prime - Of Harry or Elizabeth. - - With kirtle green and nodding flowers - To deck my hair and little waist, - I ’ll be worth a lover’s hours.... - Come, fellow, thrive, there is no haste - But soon is worn away in death. - - Soon shall the blood be tame, and soon - Our bodies lie in Darley Dale, - Unreckoning of jolly June, - With tongues past telling any tale; - My man, come loving me to-day. - - I have a wrist is smooth and brown, - I have a shoulder smooth and white, - I have my grace in any gown - By sun or moon or candle-light.... - Come Darley way, come Darley way. - - - - -LOVE’S HOUSE - - -I - - I know not how these men or those may take - Their first glad measure of love’s character, - Or whether one should let the summer make - Love’s festival, and one the falling year. - - I only know that in my prime of days - When my young branches came to blossoming, - You were the sign that loosed my lips in praise, - You were the zeal that governed all my spring. - - -II - - In prudent counsel many gathered near, - Forewarning us of deft and secret snares - That are love’s use. We heard them as we hear - The ticking of a clock upon the stairs. - - The troops of reason, careful to persuade, - Blackened love’s name, but love was more than these, - For we had wills to venture unafraid - The trouble of unnavigable seas. - - -III - - Their word was but a barren seed that lies - Undrawn of the sun’s health and undesired, - Because the habit of their hearts was wise, - Because the wisdom of their tongues was tired. - - For in the smother of contentious pride, - And in the fear of each tumultuous mood, - Our love has kept serenely fortified - And unusurped one stedfast solitude. - - -IV - - Dark words, and hasty humours of the blood - Have come to us and made no longer stay - Than footprints of a bird upon the mud - That in an hour the tide will take away. - - But not March weather over ploughlands blown, - Nor cresses green upon their gravel bed, - Are beautiful with the clean rigour grown - Of quiet thought our love has piloted. - - -V - - I sit before the hearths of many men, - When speech goes gladly, eager to withhold - No word at all, yet when I pass again - The last of words is captive and untold. - - We talk together in love’s house, and there - No thought but seeks what counsel you may give, - And every secret trouble from its lair - Comes to your hand, no longer fugitive. - - -VI - - I woo the world, with burning will to be - Delighted in all fortune it may find, - And still the strident dogs of jealousy - Go mocking down the tunnels of my mind. - - Only for you my contemplation goes - Clean as a god’s, undarkened of pretence, - Most happy when your garner overflows, - Achieving in your prosperous diligence. - - -VII - - When from the dusty corners of my brain - Comes limping some ungainly word or deed, - I know not if my dearest friend’s disdain - Be durable or brief, spent husk or seed. - - But your rebuke and that poor fault of mine - Go straitly outcast, and we close the door, - And I, no promise asking and no sign, - Stand blameless in love’s presence as before. - - -VIII - - A beggar in the ditch, I stand and call - My questions out upon the queer parade - Of folk that hurry by, and one and all - Go down the road with never answer made. - - I do not question love. I am a lord - High at love’s table, and the vigilant king, - Unquestioned, from the hubbub at the board - Leans down to me and tells me everything. - - - - -COTSWOLD LOVE - - - Blue skies are over Cotswold - And April snows go by, - The lasses turn their ribbons - For April’s in the sky, - And April is the season - When Sabbath girls are dressed, - From Rodboro’ to Campden, - In all their silken best. - - An ankle is a marvel - When first the buds are brown, - And not a lass but knows it - From Stow to Gloucester town. - And not a girl goes walking - Along the Cotswold lanes - But knows men’s eyes in April - Are quicker than their brains. - - It’s little that it matters, - So long as you’re alive, - If you’re eighteen in April, - Or rising sixty-five, - When April comes to Amberley - With skies of April blue, - And Cotswold girls are briding - With slyly tilted shoe. - - - - -WITH DAFFODILS - - - I send you daffodils, my dear, - For these are emperors of spring, - And in my heart you keep so clear - So delicate an empery, - That none but emperors could be - Ambassadors endowed to bring - My messages of honesty. - - My mind makes faring to and fro, - Deft or bewildered, dark or kind, - That not the eye of God may know - Which motion is of true estate - And which a twisted runagate - Of all the farings of my mind, - And which has honesty for mate. - - Only my love for you is clean - Of scandal’s use, and though, may be, - Far rangers have my passions been,-- - Since thus the word of Eden went,-- - Yet of the springs of my content, - My very wells of honesty - Are you the only firmament. - - - - -FOUNDATIONS - - - Those lovers old had rare conceits - To make persuasion beautiful, - Or rail upon the pretty fool - Who would not share those wanton sweets - That, guarded, soon are bitterness. - - But we, my love, can look on these - Old tournaments of wit, and say - What novices of love were they, - Who loved by seasons and degrees, - And in the rate of more and less. - - We will not make of love a stale - For deft and nimble argument, - Nor shall denial and consent - Be processes whereof shall fail - One surety that we possess. - - - - -DEAR AND INCOMPARABLE - - - Dear and incomparable - Is that love to me - Flowing out of the woodlands, - Out of the sea; - Out of the firmament breathing - Between pasture and sky, - For no reward is cherished here - To reckon by. - - It is not of my earning, - Nor forfeit I can - This love that flows upon - The poverty of man, - Though faithless and unkind - I sleep and forget - This love that asks no wage of me - Waits my waking yet. - - Of such is the love, dear, - That you fold me in, - It knows no governance - Of virtue or sin; - From nothing of my achieving - Shall it enrichment take, - And the glooms of my unworthiness - It will not forsake. - - - - -A SABBATH DAY - -IN FIVE WATCHES - - -I. MORNING - -(TO M. C.) - - You were three men and women two, - And well I loved you, all of you, - And well we kept the Sabbath day. - The bells called out of Malvern town, - But never bell could call us down - As we went up the hill away. - - Was it a thousand years ago - Or yesterday that men were so - Zealous of creed and argument? - Here wind is brother to the rain, - And the hills laugh upon the plain, - And the old brain-gotten feuds are spent. - - Bring lusty laughter, lusty jest, - Bring each the song he names the best, - Bring eager thought and speech that’s keen, - Tell each his tale and tell it out, - The only shame be prudent doubt, - Bring bodies where the lust is clean. - - -II. FULL DAY - -(TO K. D.) - - We moved along the gravelled way - Between the laurels and the yews, - Some touch of old enchantment lay - About us, some remembered news - Of men who rode among the trees - With burning dreams of Camelot, - Whose names are beauty’s litanies, - As Galahad and Launcelot. - - We looked along the vaulted gloom - Of boughs unstripped of winter’s bane, - As for some pride of scarf and plume - And painted shield and broidered rein, - And through the cloven laurel walls - We searched the darkling pines and pale - Beech-boles and woodbine coronals, - As for the passing of the Grail. - - But Launcelot no travel keeps, - For brother Launcelot is dead, - And brother Galahad he sleeps - This long while in his quiet bed, - And we are all the knights that pass - Among the yews and laurels now. - They are but fruit among the grass, - And we but fruit upon the bough. - - No coloured blazon meets us here - Of all that courtly company; - Elaine is not, nor Guenevere, - The dream is but of dreams that die. - - But yet the purple violet lies - Beside the golden daffodil, - And women strong of limb and wise - And fierce of blood are with us still. - - And never through the woodland goes - The Grail of that forgotten quest, - But still about the woodland flows - The sap of God made manifest - In boughs that labour to their time, - And birds that gossip secret things, - And eager lips that seek to rhyme - The latest of a thousand springs. - - -III. DUSK - -(TO E. S. V.) - - We come from the laurels and daffodils - Down to the homestead under the fell, - We’ve gathered our hunger upon the hills, - And that is well. - - Howbeit to-morrow gives or takes, - And leads to barren or flowering ways, - We’ve a linen cloth and wheaten cakes, - For which be praise. - - Here in the valley at lambing-time - The shepherd folk of their watching tell - While the shadows up to the beacon climb, - And that is well. - Let be what may when we make an end - Of the laughter and labour of all our days - We’ve men to friend and women to friend, - For whom be praise. - - -IV. EVENSONG - -(TO B. M.) - - Come, let us tell it over, - Each to each by the fireside, - How that earth has been a swift adventure for us, - And the watches of the day as a gay song and a right song, - And now the traveller wind has found a bed, - And the sheep crowd under the thorn. - - Good was the day and our travelling, - And now there is evensong to sing. - - Night, and along the valleys - Watch the eyes of the homesteads. - The dark hills are very still and still are the stars. - Patiently under the ploughlands the wheat moves and the barley. - The secret hour of love is upon the sky, - And our thought in praise is aflame. - - Sing evensong as well we may - For our travel upon this Sabbath day. - - Earth, we have known you truly, - Heard your mutable music, - Have been your lovers and felt the savour of you, - And you have quickened in us the blood’s fire and the heart’s fire. - We have wooed and striven with you and made you ours - By the strength sprung out of your loins. - - Lift the latch on its twisted thong, - And an end be made of our evensong. - - -V. NIGHT - -(TO H. S. S.) - - The barriers of sleep are crossed - And I alone am yet awake, - Keeping another Pentecost - For that new visitation’s sake - Of life descending on the hills - In blackthorn bloom and daffodils. - - At peace upon my pillow lain - I celebrate the spirit come - In spring’s immutable youth again - Across the lands of Christendom; - I hear in all the choral host - The coming of the Holy Ghost. - - The sacrament of bough and blade, - Of populous folds and building birds - I take, till now an end is made - Of praise and ceremonial words, - And I too turn myself to keep - The quiet festival of sleep. - -_March 1913._ - - - - -A DEDICATION - -(TO E. G.) - - -I - - Sometimes youth comes to age and asks a blessing, - Or counsel, or a tale of old estate, - Yet youth will still be curiously guessing - The old man’s thought when death is at his gate; - For all their courteous words they are not one, - This youth and age, but civil strangers still, - Age with the best of all his seasons done, - Youth with his face towards the upland hill. - Age looks for rest while youth runs far and wide, - Age talks with death, which is youth’s very fear, - Age knows so many comrades who have died, - Youth burns that one companion is so dear. - So, with good will, and in one house, may dwell - These two, and talk, and all be yet to tell. - - -II - - But there are men who, in the time of age, - Sometimes remember all that age forgets: - The early hope, the hardly compassed wage, - The change of corn, and snow, and violets; - They are glad of praise; they know this morning brings - As true a song as any yesterday; - Their labour still is set to many things, - They cry their questions out along the way. - They give as who may gladly take again - Some gift at need; they move with gallant ease - Among all eager companies of men; - And never signed of age are such as these. - They speak with youth, and never speak amiss; - Of such are you; and what is youth but this? - - - - -RUPERT BROOKE - -(DIED APRIL 23, 1915) - - - To-day I have talked with old Euripides; - Shakespeare this morning sang for my content - Of chimney-sweepers; through the Carian trees - Comes beating still the nightingales’ lament; - The Tabard ales to-day are freshly brewed; - Wordsworth is with me, mounting Loughrigg Fell; - All timeless deaths in Lycid are renewed, - And basils blossom yet for Isabel. - - Quick thoughts are these; they do not pass; they gave - Only to death such little, casual things - As are the noteless levies of the grave,-- - Sad flesh, weak verse, and idle marketings. - So my mortality for yours complains, - While our immortal fellowship remains. - - - - -ON READING FRANCIS LEDWIDGE’S LAST SONGS - - - At April’s end, when blossoms break - To birth upon my apple-tree, - I know the certain year will take - Full harvest of this infancy. - - At April’s end, when comes the dear - Occasion of your valley tune, - I know your beauty’s arc is here, - A little ghostly morning moon. - - Yet are these fosterlings of rhyme - As fortunately born to spend - Happy conspiracies with time - As apple flowers at April’s end. - - - - -IN THE WOODS - - - I was in the woods to-day, - And the leaves were spinning there, - Rich apparelled in decay,-- - In decay more wholly fair - Than in life they ever were. - - Gold and rich barbaric red - Freakt with pale and sapless vein, - Spinning, spinning, spun and sped - With a little sob of pain - Back to harbouring earth again. - - Long in homely green they shone - Through the summer rains and sun, - Now their humbleness is gone, - Now their little season run, - Pomp and pageantry begun. - - Sweet was life, and buoyant breath, - Lovely too; but for a day - Issues from the house of death - Yet more beautiful array: - Hark, a whisper--“Come away.” - - One by one they spin and fall, - But they fall in regal pride: - Dying, do they hear a call - Rising from an ebbless tide, - And, hearing, are beatified? - - - - -LATE SUMMER - - - Though summer long delayeth - Her blue and golden boon, - Yet now at length she stayeth - Her wings above the noon; - She sets the waters dreaming - To murmurous leafy tones, - The weeded waters gleaming - Above the stepping-stones. - - Where fern and ivied willow - Lean o’er the seaward brook, - I read a volume mellow-- - A poet’s fairy-book; - The seaward brook is narrow, - The hazel spans its pride, - And like a painted arrow - The king-bird keeps the tide. - - - - -JANUARY DUSK - - - Austere and clad in sombre robes of grey, - With hands upfolded and with silent wings, - In unimpassioned mystery the day - Passes; a lonely thrush its requiem sings. - - The dust of night is tangled in the boughs - Of leafless lime and lilac, and the pine - Grows blacker, and the star upon the brows - Of sleep is set in heaven for a sign. - - Earth’s little weary peoples fall on peace - And dream of breaking buds and blossoming, - Of primrose airs, of days of large increase, - And all the coloured retinue of spring. - - - - -AT GRAFTON - - - God laughed when he made Grafton - That’s under Bredon Hill, - A jewel in a jewelled plain. - The seasons work their will - On golden thatch and crumbling stone, - And every soft-lipped breeze - Makes music for the Grafton men - In comfortable trees. - - God’s beauty over Grafton - Stole into roof and wall, - And hallowed every pavèd path - And every lowly stall, - And to a woven wonder - Conspired with one accord - The labour of the servant, - The labour of the Lord. - - And momently to Grafton - Comes in from vale and wold - The sound of sheep unshepherded, - The sound of sheep in fold, - And, blown along the bases - Of lands that set their wide - Frank brows to God, comes chanting - The breath of Bristol tide. - - - - -DOMINION - - - I went beneath the sunny sky - When all things bowed to June’s desire,-- - The pansy with its steadfast eye, - The blue shells on the lupin spire, - - The swelling fruit along the boughs, - The grass grown heady in the rain, - Dark roses fitted for the brows - Of queens great kings have sung in vain; - - My little cat with tiger bars, - Bright claws all hidden in content; - Swift birds that flashed like darkling stars - Across the cloudy continent; - - The wiry-coated fellow curled - Stump-tailed upon the sunny flags; - The bees that sacked a coloured world - Of treasure for their honey-bags. - - And all these things seemed very glad, - The sun, the flowers, the birds on wing, - The jolly beasts, the furry-clad - Fat bees, the fruit, and everything. - - But gladder than them all was I, - Who, being man, might gather up - The joy of all beneath the sky, - And add their treasure to my cup, - - And travel every shining way, - And laugh with God in God’s delight, - Create a world for every day, - And store a dream for every night. - - - - -THE MIRACLE - - - Come, sweetheart, listen, for I have a thing - Most wonderful to tell you--news of spring. - - Albeit winter still is in the air, - And the earth troubled, and the branches bare, - - Yet down the fields to-day I saw her pass-- - The spring--her feet went shining through the grass. - - She touched the ragged hedgerows--I have seen - Her finger-prints, most delicately green; - - And she has whispered to the crocus leaves, - And to the garrulous sparrows in the eaves. - - Swiftly she passed and shyly, and her fair - Young face was hidden in her cloudy hair. - - She would not stay, her season is not yet, - But she has reawakened, and has set - - The sap of all the world astir, and rent - Once more the shadows of our discontent. - - Triumphant news--a miracle I sing-- - The everlasting miracle of spring. - - - - -MILLERS DALE - - - Barefoot we went by Millers Dale - When meadowsweet was golden gloom - And happy love was in the vale - Singing upon the summer bloom - Of gipsy crop and branches laid - Of willows over chanting pools, - Barefoot by Millers Dale we made - Our summer festival of fools. - - Folly bright-eyed, and quick, and young - Was there with all his silly plots, - And trotty wagtail stepped among - The delicate forget-me-nots, - And laughter played with us above - The rocky shelves and weeded holes - And we had fellowship to love - The pigeons and the water-voles. - - Time soon shall be when we are all - Stiller than ever runs the Wye, - And every bitterness shall fall - To-morrow in obscurity, - And wars be done, and treasons fail, - Yet shall new friends go down to greet - The singing rocks of Millers Dale, - And willow pools and meadowsweet. - - - - -WRITTEN AT LUDLOW CASTLE - -(IN THE HALL WHERE COMUS WAS FIRST PERFORMED) - - - Where wall and sill and broken window-frame - Are bright with flowers unroofed against the skies, - And nothing but the nesting jackdaws’ cries - Breaks the hushed even, once imperial came - The muse that moved transfiguring the name - Of Puritan, and beautiful and wise - The verses fell, forespeaking Paradise, - And poetry set all this hall aflame. - - Now silence has come down upon the place - Where life and song so wonderfully went, - And the mole’s afoot now where that passion rang, - Yet Comus now first moves his laurelled pace, - For song and life for ever are unspent, - And they are more than ghosts who lived and sang. - - - - -WORDSWORTH AT GRASMERE - - - These hills and waters fostered you - Abiding in your argument - Until all comely wisdom drew - About you, and the years were spent. - - Now over hill and water stays - A world more intimately wise, - Built of your dedicated days, - And seen in your beholding eyes. - - So, marvellous and far, the mind, - That slept among them when began - Waters and hills, leaps up to find - Its kingdom in the thought of man. - - - - -SUNRISE ON RYDAL WATER - -(TO E. DE S.) - - - Come down at dawn from windless hills - Into the valley of the lake, - Where yet a larger quiet fills - The hour, and mist and water make - With rocks and reeds and island boughs - One silence and one element, - Where wonder goes surely as once - It went - By Galilean prows. - - Moveless the water and the mist, - Moveless the secret air above, - Hushed, as upon some happy tryst - The poised expectancy of love; - What spirit is it that adores - What mighty presence yet unseen? - What consummation works apace - Between - These rapt enchanted shores? - - Never did virgin beauty wake - Devouter to the bridal feast - Than moves this hour upon the lake - In adoration to the east; - Here is the bride a god may know, - The primal will, the young consent, - Till surely upon the appointed mood - Intent - The god shall leap--and, lo, - - Over the lake’s end strikes the sun, - White, flameless fire; some purity - Thrilling the mist, a splendour won - Out of the world’s heart. Let there be - Thoughts, and atonements, and desires, - Proud limbs, and undeliberate tongue, - Where now we move with mortal oars - Among - Immortal dews and fires. - - So the old mating goes apace, - Wind with the sea, and blood with thought, - Lover with lover; and the grace - Of understanding comes unsought - When stars into the twilight steer, - Or thrushes build among the may, - Or wonder moves between the hills, - And day - Comes up on Rydal mere. - - - - -SEPTEMBER - - - Wind and the robin’s note to-day - Have heard of autumn and betray - The green long reign of summer. - The rust is falling in the leaves, - September stands beside the sheaves, - The new, the happy comer. - - Not sad my season of the red - And russet orchards gaily spread - From Cholesbury to Cooming, - Nor sad when twilit valley trees - Are ships becalmed on misty seas, - And beetles go abooming. - - Now soon shall come the morning crowds - Of starlings, soon the coloured clouds - From oak and ash and willow, - And soon the thorn and briar shall be - Rich in their crimson livery, - In scarlet and in yellow. - - Spring laughed and thrilled a million veins, - And summer shone above her rains - To fill September’s faring; - September talks as kings who know - The world’s way and superbly go - In robes of wisdom’s wearing. - - - - -OLTON POOLS - -(TO G. C. G.) - - - Now June walks on the waters, - And the cuckoo’s last enchantment - Passes from Olton pools. - - Now dawn comes to my window - Breathing midsummer roses, - And scythes are wet with dew. - - Is it not strange for ever - That, bowered in this wonder, - Man keeps a jealous heart?... - - That June and the June waters, - And birds and dawn-lit roses, - Are gospels in the wind, - - Fading upon the deserts, - Poor pilgrim revelations?... - Hist ... over Olton pools! - - - - -OF GREATHAM - -(TO THOSE WHO LIVE THERE) - - - For peace, than knowledge more desirable - Into your Sussex quietness I came, - When summer’s green and gold and azure fell - Over the world in flame. - - And peace upon your pasture-lands I found, - Where grazing flocks drift on continually, - As little clouds that travel with no sound - Across a windless sky. - - Out of your oaks the birds call to their mates - That brood among the pines, where hidden deep - From curious eyes a world’s adventure waits - In columned choirs of sleep. - - Under the calm ascension of the night - We heard the mellow lapsing and return - Of night-owls purring in their groundling flight - Through lanes of darkling fern. - - Unbroken peace when all the stars were drawn - Back to their lairs of light, and ranked along - From shire to shire the downs out of the dawn - Were risen in golden song. - - * * * * * - - I sing of peace who have known the large unrest - Of men bewildered in their travelling, - And I have known the bridal earth unblest - By the brigades of spring. - - I have known that loss. And now the broken thought - Of nations marketing in death I know, - The very winds to threnodies are wrought - That on your downlands blow. - - I sing of peace. Was it but yesterday - I came among your roses and your corn? - Then momently amid this wrath I pray - For yesterday reborn. - - - - -MAMBLE - - - I never went to Mamble - That lies above the Teme, - So I wonder who’s in Mamble, - And whether people seem - Who breed and brew along there - As lazy as the name, - And whether any song there - Sets alehouse wits aflame. - - The finger-post says Mamble, - And that is all I know - Of the narrow road to Mamble, - And should I turn and go - To that place of lazy token - That lies above the Teme, - There might be a Mamble broken - That was lissom in a dream. - - So leave the road to Mamble - And take another road - To as good a place as Mamble - Be it lazy as a toad; - Who travels Worcester county - Takes any place that comes - When April tosses bounty - To the cherries and the plums. - - - - -OUT OF THE MOON - - - Merely the moonlight - Piercing the boughs of my may-tree, - Falling upon my ferns; - Only the night - Touching my ferns with silver bloom - Of sea-flowers here in the sleeping city-- - And suddenly the imagination burns - With knowledge of many a dark significant doom - Out of antiquity, - Sung to hushed halls by troubadours - Who knew the ways of the heart because they had seen - The moonlight washing the garden’s deeper green - To silver flowers, - Falling with tidings out of the moon, as now - It falls on the ferns under my may-tree bough. - - - - -MOONLIT APPLES - - - At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows, - And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those - Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes - A cloud on the moon in the autumn night. - - A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then - There is no sound at the top of the house of men - Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again - Dapples the apples with deep-sea light. - - They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams; - On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams - Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams, - And quiet is the steep stair under. - - In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep. - And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep - Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep - On moon-washed apples of wonder. - - - - -COTTAGE SONG - - - Morning and night I bring - Clear water from the spring, - And through the lyric noon - I hear the larks in tune, - And when the shadows fall - There’s providence for all. - - My garden is alight - With currants red and white; - And my blue curtains peep - On starry courses deep, - When down her silver tides - The moon on Cotswold rides. - - My path of paven grey - Is thoroughfare all day - For fellowship, till time - Bids us with candles climb - The little whitewashed stair - Above my lavender. - - - - -THE MIDLANDS - - - Black in the summer night my Cotswold hill - Aslant my window sleeps, beneath a sky - Deep as the bedded violets that fill - March woods with dusky passion. As I lie - Abed between cool walls I watch the host - Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain, - And drowsily the habit of these most - Beloved of English lands moves in my brain, - While silence holds dominion of the dark, - Save when the foxes from the spinneys bark. - - I see the valleys in their morning mist - Wreathed under limpid hills in moving light, - Happy with many a yeoman melodist: - I see the little roads of twinkling white - Busy with fieldward teams and market gear - Of rosy men, cloth-gaitered, who can tell - The many-minded changes of the year, - Who know why crops and kine fare ill or well; - I see the sun persuade the mist away, - Till town and stead are shining to the day. - - I see the wagons move along the rows - Of ripe and summer-breathing clover-flower, - I see the lissom husbandman who knows - Deep in his heart the beauty of his power, - As, lithely pitched, the full-heaped fork bids on - The harvest home. I hear the rickyard fill - With gossip as in generations gone, - While wagon follows wagon from the hill. - I think how, when our seasons all are sealed, - Shall come the unchanging harvest from the field. - - I see the barns and comely manors planned - By men who somehow moved in comely thought, - Who, with a simple shippon to their hand, - As men upon some godlike business wrought; - I see the little cottages that keep - Their beauty still where since Plantagenet - Have come the shepherds happily to sleep, - Finding the loaves and cups of cider set; - I see the twisted shepherds, brown and old, - Driving at dusk their glimmering sheep to fold. - - And now the valleys that upon the sun - Broke from their opal veils, are veiled again, - And the last light upon the wolds is done, - And silence falls on flocks and fields and men; - And black upon the night I watch my hill, - And the stars shine, and there an owly wing - Brushes the night, and all again is still, - And, from this land of worship that I sing, - I turn to sleep, content that from my sires - I draw the blood of England’s midmost shires. - - - - -OLD CROW - - - The bird in the corn - Is a marvellous crow. - He was laid and was born - In the season of snow; - And he chants his old catches - Like a ghost under hatches. - - He comes from the shades - Of his wood very early, - And works in the blades - Of the wheat and the barley, - And he’s happy, although - He’s a grumbleton crow. - - The larks have devices - For sunny delight, - And the sheep in their fleeces - Are woolly and white; - But these things are the scorn - Of the bird in the corn. - - And morning goes by, - And still he is there, - Till a rose in the sky - Calls him back to his lair - In the boughs where the gloom - Is a part of his plume. - - But the boy in the lane - With his gun, by and by, - To the heart of the grain - Will narrowly spy, - And the twilight will come, - And no crow will fly home. - - - - -VENUS IN ARDEN - - - Now Love, her mantle thrown, - Goes naked by, - Threading the woods alone, - Her royal eye - Happy because the primroses again - Break on the winter continence of men. - - I saw her pass to-day - In Warwickshire, - With the old imperial way, - The old desire, - Fresh as among those other flowers they went - More beautiful for Adon’s discontent. - - Those other years she made - Her festival - When the blue eggs were laid - And lambs were tall, - By the Athenian rivers while the reeds - Made love melodious for the Ganymedes. - - And now through Cantlow brakes, - By Wilmcote hill, - To Avon-side, she makes - Her garlands still, - And I who watch her flashing limbs am one - With youth whose days three thousand years are done. - - - - -ON A LAKE - - - Sweet in the rushes - The reed-singers make - A music that hushes - The life of the lake; - The leaves are dumb, - And the tides are still, - And no calls come - From the flocks on the hill. - - Forgotten now - Are nightingales, - And on his bough - The linnet fails,-- - Midway the mere - My mirrored boat - Shall rest and hear - A slenderer note. - - Though, heart, you measure - But one proud rhyme, - You build a treasure - Confounding time-- - Sweet in the rushes - The reed-singers make - A music that hushes - The life of the lake. - - - - -HARVEST MOON - - - “Hush!” was my whisper - At the stair-top - When the waggoners were down below - Home from the barley-crop. - Through the high window - Looked the harvest moon, - While the waggoners sang - A harvest tune,-- - “Hush!” was my whisper when - Marjory stept - Down from her attic-room, - A true-love-adept. - - “Fill a can, fill a can,” - Waggoners of heart were they, - “Harvest-home, harvest-home, - Barleycorn is home to-day.” ... - “Marjory, hush now-- - Harvest--you hear?”-- - Red was the moon’s rose - On the full year, - The cobwebs shook, so well - Did the waggoners sing-- - “Hush!”--there was beauty at - That harvesting. - - - - -AT AN EARTHWORKS - - - Ringed high with turf the arena lies, - The neighbouring world unseen, unheard, - Here are but unhorizoned skies, - And on the skies a passing bird, - - The conies and a wandering sheep, - The castings of the chambered mole,-- - These, and the haunted years that keep - Lost agonies of blood and soul. - - They say that in the midnight moon - The ghostly legions gather yet, - And hear a ghostly timbrel-tune, - And see a ghostly combat met. - - These are but yeoman’s tales. And here - No marvel on the midnight falls, - But starlight marvellously clear, - Being girdled in these shadowy walls. - - Yet now strange glooms of ancestry - Creep on me through this morning light, - Some spectral self is seeking me ... - I will not parley with the night. - - - - -INSTRUCTION - - - I have a place in a little garden, - That laurel-leaf and fern - Keep a cool place though fires of summer - All the green grasses burn. - Little cool winds creep there about - When winds all else are dead, - And tired limbs there find gentle keeping, - And humours of sloth are shed. - - So do your songs come always to me, - Poets of age and age, - Clear and cool as rivers of wind - Threading my hermitage, - Stilling my mind from tribulation - Of life half-seen, half-heard, - With images made in the brain’s quietness, - And the leaping of a word. - - - - -HABITATION - - - High up in the sky there, now, you know, - In this May twilight, our cottage is asleep, - Tenantless, and no creature there to go - Near it but Mrs. Fry’s fat cows, and sheep - Dove-coloured, as is Cotswold. No one hears - Under that cherry-tree the night-jars yet, - The windows are uncurtained; on the stairs - Silence is but by tip-toe silence met. - All doors are fast there. It is a dwelling put by - From use for a little, or long, up there in the sky. - - Empty; a walled-in silence, in this twilight of May-- - A home for lovers, and friendly withdrawing, and sleep, - With none to love there, nor laugh, nor climb from the day - To the candles and linen.... Yet in the silence creep, - This minute, I know, little ghosts, little virtuous lives, - Breathing upon that still, insensible place, - Touching the latches, sorting the napkins and knives, - And such for the comfort of being, and bowls for the grace, - That roses will brim; they are creeping from that room to this, - One room, and two, till the four are visited ... they, - Little ghosts, little lives, are our thoughts in this twilight of May, - Signs that even the curious man would miss, - Of travelling lovers to Cotswold, signs of an hour, - Very soon, when up from the valley in June will ride - Lovers by Lynch to Oakridge up in the wide - Bow of the hill, to a garden of lavender flower.... - - The doors are locked; no foot falls; the hearths are dumb-- - But we are there--we are waiting ourselves who come. - - - - -WRITTEN IN WINTERBORNE CAME CHURCH - -(William Barnes, 1801-1886) - -_To Mrs. Thomas Hardy_ - - - I do not use to listen well - At sermon time, - I ’ld rather hear the plainest rhyme - Than tales the parsons tell; - - The homespun of experience - They will not wear, - But walk a transcendental air - In dusty rags of sense. - - But humbly in your little church - Alone I watch; - Old rector, lift again the latch, - Here is a heart to search. - - Come, with a simple word and wise - Quicken my brain, - And while upon the painted pane - The painted butterflies - - Beat in the early April beams, - You shall instruct - My spirit in the knowledge plucked - From your still Dorset dreams. - - Your word shall strive with no obscure - Debated text, - Your vision being unperplexed, - Your loving purpose pure. - - I know you’ll speak of April flowers, - Or lambs in pen, - Or happy-hearted maids and men - Weaving their April hours. - - Or rising to your thought will come, - For lessoning, - Those lovers of an older spring, - That now in tombs are dumb. - - And brooding in your theme shall be, - Half said, half heard, - The presage of a poet’s word - To mock mortality. - - * * * * * - - The years are on your grave the while, - And yet, almost, - I think to see your surpliced ghost - Stand hesitant in the aisle, - - Find me sole congregation there, - Assess my mood, - Know mine a kindred solitude, - And climb the pulpit-stair. - - - - -BUDS - - - The raining hour is done, - And, threaded on the bough, - The May-buds in the sun - Are shining emeralds now. - - As transitory these - As things of April will, - Yet, trembling in the trees, - Is briefer beauty still. - - For, flowering from the sky - Upon an April day, - Are silver buds that lie - Amid the buds of May. - - The April emeralds now, - While thrushes fill the lane, - Are linked along the bough - With silver buds of rain. - - And, straightly though to earth - The buds of silver slip, - The green buds keep the mirth - Of that companionship. - - - - -BLACKBIRD - - - He comes on chosen evenings, - My blackbird bountiful, and sings - Over the gardens of the town - Just at the hour the sun goes down. - His flight across the chimneys thick, - By some divine arithmetic, - Comes to his customary stack, - And couches there his plumage black, - And there he lifts his yellow bill, - Kindled against the sunset, till - These suburbs are like Dymock woods - Where music has her solitudes, - And while he mocks the winter’s wrong - Rapt on his pinnacle of song, - Figured above our garden plots - Those are celestial chimney-pots. - - - - -MAY GARDEN - - - A shower of green gems on my apple-tree - This first morning of May - Has fallen out of the night, to be - Herald of holiday-- - Bright gems of green that, fallen there, - Seem fixed and glowing on the air. - - Until a flutter of blackbird wings - Shakes and makes the boughs alive, - And the gems are now no frozen things, - But apple-green buds to thrive - On sap of my May garden, how well - The green September globes will tell. - - Also my pear-tree has its buds, - But they are silver yellow, - Like autumn meadows when the floods - Are silver under willow, - And here shall long and shapely pears - Be gathered while the autumn wears. - - And there are sixty daffodils - Beneath my wall.... - And jealousy it is that kills - This world when all - The spring’s behaviour here is spent - To make the world magnificent. - - - - -AT AN INN - - - We are talkative proud, and assured, and self-sufficient, - The quick of the earth this day; - This inn is ours, and its courtyard, and English history, - And the Post Office up the way. - - The stars in their changes, and heavenly speculation, - The habits of birds and flowers, - And character bred of poverty and riches, - All these are ours. - - The world is ours, and these its themes and its substance, - And of these we are free men and wise; - Among them all we move in possession and judgment, - For a day, till it dies. - - But in eighteen-hundred-and-fifty, who were the tenants, - Sure and deliberate as we? - They knew us not in the time of their ascension, - Their self-sufficiency. - - And in nineteen-hundred-and-fifty this inn shall flourish, - And history still be told, - And the heat of blood shall thrive, and speculation, - When we are cold. - - - - -PERSPECTIVE - - - In the Wheatsheaf parlour I sat to see - The story of Chippington street go by, - The squire, and dames of little degree, - And drovers with cattle and flocks to cry. - - And these were all as my creatures there, - Twinkling to and fro in the sun, - And placidly I had joy, had care, - Of all their labours and dealings done. - - Into the parlour strode me then - Two fellows fiercely set at odds, - To whom the difference of men - Gave the sufficiency of God. - - They saw me, and they stept beyond - To a chamber within earshot still, - And each on each of broken bond, - And honour, and inflexible will, - - Railed. And loud the little inn grew, - But nothing I cared their quarrel to learn, - Though the issue tossing between the two - They deemed the bait of the world’s concern. - - Only I thought how most are men - Fantastic when they most are proud, - And out of my laughter I looked again - On the flowing figures of Chippington crowd. - - - - -CROCUSES - -TO E. H. C. - - - Desires, - Little determined desires, - Gripped by the mould, - Moving so hardly among - The earth, of whose heart they were bred, - That is old; it is old, - Not gracious to little desires such as these, - But apter for work on the bases of trees, - Whose branches are hung - Overhead, - Very mightily, there overhead. - - Through the summer they stirred, - They strove to the bulbs after May, - Until harvest and song of the bird - Went together away; - And ever till coming of snows - They worked in the mould, for undaunted were those - Swift little determined desires, in the earth - Without sign, any day, - Ever shaping to marvels of birth, - Far away. - - And we went - Without heed - On our way, - Never knowing what virtue was spent, - Day by day, - By those little desires that were gallant to breed - Such beauty as fortitude may. - Not once in our mind - Was that corner of earth under trees, - Very mighty and tall, - As we travelled the roads and the seas, - And gathered the wage of our kind, - And were laggard or trim to the call - Of the duties that lengthen the hours - Into seasons that flourish and fall. - - And blind, - In the womb of the flowers, - Unresting they wrought, - In the bulbs, in the depth of the year, - Buried far from our thought; - Till one day, when the thrushes were clear - In their note it was spring--and they know-- - Unheeding we came into sight - Of that corner forgotten, and lo, - They had won through the meshes of mould, - And treasuries lay in the light, - Of ivory, purple, and gold. - - - - -RIDDLES, R.F.C.[1] - -(1916) - - - He was a boy of April beauty; one - Who had not tried the world; who, while the sun - Flamed yet upon the eastern sky, was done. - - Time would have brought him in her patient ways-- - So his young beauty spoke--to prosperous days, - To fulness of authority and praise. - - He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent - His boy’s dear life for England. Be content: - No honour of age had been more excellent. - - [1] Lieutenant Stewart G. Ridley, Royal Flying Corps, sacrificed his - life in the Egyptian desert in an attempt to save a comrade. He was - twenty years of age. - - - - -THE SHIPS OF GRIEF - - - On seas where every pilot fails - A thousand thousand ships to-day - Ride with a moaning in their sails, - Through winds grey and waters grey. - - They are the ships of grief. They go - As fleets are derelict and driven, - Estranged from every port they know, - Scarce asking fortitude of heaven. - - No, do not hail them. Let them ride - Lonely as they would lonely be ... - There is an hour will prove the tide, - There is a sun will strike the sea. - - - - -NOCTURNE - - - O royal night, under your stars that keep - Their golden troops in charted motion set, - The living legions are renewed in sleep - For bloodier battle yet. - - O royal death, under your boundless sky - Where unrecorded constellations throng, - Dispassionate those other legions lie, - Invulnerably strong. - - - - -THE PATRIOT - - - Scarce is my life more dear to me, - Brief tutor of oblivion, - Than fields below the rookery - That comfortably looks upon - The little street of Piddington. - - I never think of Avon’s meadows, - Ryton woods or Rydal mere, - Or moon-tide moulding Cotswold shadows, - But I know that half the fear - Of death’s indifference is here. - - I love my land. No heart can know - The patriot’s mystery, until - It aches as mine for woods ablow - In Gloucestershire with daffodil, - Or Bicester brakes that violets fill. - - No man can tell what passion surges - For the house of his nativity - In the patriot’s blood, until he purges - His grosser mood of jealousy, - And comes to meditate with me - - Of gifts of earth that stamp his brain - As mine the pools of Ludlow mill, - The hazels fencing Trilly’s Lane, - And Forty Acres under Brill, - The ferry under Elsfield hill. - - These are what England is to me, - Not empire, nor the name of her - Ranging from pole to tropic sea. - These are the soil in which I bear - All that I have of character. - - That men my fellows near and far - May live in like communion, - Is all I pray; all pastures are - The best beloved beneath the sun; - I have my own; I envy none. - - - - -EPILOGUE FOR A MASQUE - - - A little time they lived again, and lo! - Back to the quiet night the shadows go, - And the great folds of silence once again - Are over fools and kings and fighting-men. - - A little while they went with stumbling feet, - With spears of hate, and love all flowery sweet, - With wondering hearts and bright adventurous wills, - And now their dust is on a thousand hills. - - We dream of them, as men unborn shall dream - Of us, who strive a little with the stream - Before we too go out beyond the day, - And are as much a memory as they. - - And Death, so coming, shall not seem a thing - Of any fear, nor terrible his wing. - We too shall be a tale on earth, and time - Shall shape our pilgrimage into a rhyme. - - - - -THE GUEST - - - Sometimes I feel that death is very near, - And, with half-lifted hand, - Looks in my eyes, and tells me not to fear, - But walk his friendly land, - Comrade with him, and wise - As peace is wise. - - Then, greatly though my heart with pity moves - For dear imperilled loves, - I somehow know - That death is friendly so, - A comfortable spirit; one who takes - Long thought for all our sakes. - - I wonder; will he come that friendly way, - That guest, or roughly in the appointed day? - And will, when the last drops of life are spilt, - My soul be torn from me, - Or, like a ship truly and trimly built, - Slip quietly to sea? - - - - -TREASON - - - What time I write my roundelays, - I am as proud as princes gone, - Who built their empires in old days, - As Tamburlaine or Solomon; - And wisely though companions then - Say well it is and well I sing, - Assured above the praise of men - I am a solitary king. - - But when I leave that straiter mood, - That lonely hour, and put aside - The continence of solitude, - I fall in treason to my pride, - And if a witling’s word be spent - Upon my song in jealousy, - In anger and in argument - I am as derelict as he. - - - - -POLITICS - - - You say a thousand things, - Persuasively, - And with strange passion hotly I agree, - And praise your zest, - And then - A blackbird sings - On April lilac, or fieldfaring men, - Ghostlike, with loaded wain, - Come down the twilit lane - To rest, - And what is all your argument to me? - - Oh, yes--I know, I know, - It must be so-- - You must devise - Your myriad policies, - For we are little wise, - And must be led and marshalled, lest we keep - Too fast a sleep - Far from the central world’s realities. - Yes, we must heed-- - For surely you reveal - Life’s very heart; surely with flaming zeal - You search our folly and our secret need; - And surely it is wrong - To count my blackbird’s song, - My cones of lilac, and my wagon team, - More than a world of dream. - - But still - A voice calls from the hill-- - I must away-- - I cannot hear your argument to-day. - - - - -FOR A GUEST ROOM - - - All words are said, - And may it fall - That, crowning these, - You here shall find - A friendly bed, - A sheltering wall, - Your body’s ease, - A quiet mind. - - May you forget - In happy sleep - The world that still - You hold as friend, - And may it yet - Be ours to keep - Your friendly will - To the world’s end. - - For he is blest - Who, fixed to shun - All evil, when - The worst is known, - Counts, east and west, - When life is done, - His debts to men - In love alone. - - - - -DAY - - - Dawn is up at my window, and in the May-tree - The finches gossip, and tits, and beautiful sparrows - With feathers bright and brown as September hazels. - - The sunlight is here, filtered through rosy curtains, - Docile and disembodied, a ghost of sunlight, - A gentle light to greet the dreamer returning. - - Part the curtains. I give you salutation - Day, clear day; let us be friendly fellows. - Come.... I hear the Liars about the city. - - - - -DREAMS - - - We have our dreams; not happiness. - Great cities are upon the hill - To lighten all our dream, and still - We have no cities to possess - But cities built of bitterness. - - We see gay fellows top to toe, - And girls in rainbow beauty bright-- - ’Tis but of silly dreams I write, - For up and down the streets we know, - The scavengers and harlots go. - - Give me a dozen men whose theme - Is honesty, and we will set - On high the banner of dreams ... and yet - Thousands will pass us in a stream, - Nor care a penny what we dream. - - - - -RESPONSIBILITY - - - You ploughmen at the gate, - All that you are for me - Is of my mind create, - And in my brain to be - A figure newly won - From the world’s confusion. - - And if you are of grace, - That’s honesty for me, - And if of evil face, - Recorded then shall be - Dishonour that I saw - Not beauty, but the flaw. - - - - -PROVOCATIONS - - - I am no merry monger when - I see the slatterns of the town: - I hate to think of docile men - Whose angers all are driven down; - For sluts make joy a thing obscene, - And in contempt is nothing clean. - - I like to see the ladies walk - With heels to set their chins atilt: - I like to hear the clergy talk - Of other clergy’s people’s guilt; - For happy is the amorous eye, - And indignation clears the sky. - - - - -TRIAL - - - Beauty of old and beauty yet to be, - Stripped of occasion, have security; - This hour it is searches the judgment through, - When masks of beauty walk with beauty too. - - - - -CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS - -THE TROJAN WOMEN, BIRMINGHAM REPERTORY THEATRE, APRIL 1918 - - - Shades, that our town-fellows have come - To hear rewake for Christendom - This cleansing of a Pagan wrong - In flowing tides of tragic song,-- - You shadows that the living call - To walk again the Trojan wall,-- - You lips and countenance renewed - Of an immortal fortitude,-- - Know that, among the silent rows - Of these our daily town-fellows, - Watching the shades with these who bring - But mortal ears to this you sing, - There somewhere sits the Greek who made - This gift of song, himself a shade. - - - - -CHARACTER - - - If one should tell you that in such a spring - The hawthorn boughs into the blackbird’s nest - Poured poison, or that once at harvesting - The ears were stony, from so manifest - Slander of proven faith in tree and corn - You would turn unheeding, knowing him forsworn. - - Yet now, when one whose life has never known - Corruption, as you know: whose days have been - As daily tidings in your heart of lone - And gentle courage, suffers the word unclean - Of envious tongues, doubting you dare not cry-- - “I have been this man’s familiar, and you lie.” - - - - -REALITY - - - It is strange how we travel the wide world over, - And see great churches and foreign streets, - And armies afoot and kings of wonder, - And deeds a-doing to fill the sheets - That grave historians will pen - To ferment the brains of simple men. - - And all the time the heart remembers - The quiet habit of one far place, - The drawings and books, the turn of a passage, - The glance of a dear familiar face, - And there is the true cosmopolis, - While the thronging world a phantom is. - - - - -EPILOGUE - - - Come tell us, you that travel far - With brave or shabby merchandise, - Have you saluted any star - That goes uncourtiered in the skies? - - Do you remember leaf or wing - Or brook the willows leant along, - Or any small familiar thing - That passed you as you went along? - - Or does the trade that is your lust - Drive you as yoke-beasts driven apace, - Making the world a road of dust - From market-place to market-place? - - Your traffic in the grain, the wine, - In purple and in cloth of gold, - In treasure of the field and mine, - In fables of the poets told,-- - - But have you laughed the wine-cups dry - And on the loaves of plenty fed, - And walked, with all your banners high, - In gold and purple garmented? - - And do you know the songs you sell - And cry them out along the way? - And is the profit that you tell - After your travel day by day - - Sinew and sap of life, or husk-- - Dead coffer-ware or kindled brain? - And do you gather in the dusk - To make your heroes live again? - - If the grey dust is over all, - And stars and leaves and wings forgot, - And your blood holds no festival-- - Go out from us; we need you not. - - But if you are immoderate men, - Zealots of joy, the salt and sting - And savour of life upon you--then - We call you to our counselling. - - And we will hew the holy boughs - To make us level rows of oars, - And we will set our shining prows - For strange and unadventured shores. - - Where the great tideways swiftliest run - We will be stronger than the strong - And sack the cities of the sun - And spend our booty in a song. - - - - -MOONRISE - - - Where are you going, you pretty riders?-- - To the moon’s rising, the rising of death’s moon, - Where the waters move not, and birds are still and songless, - Soon, very soon. - - Where are you faring to, you proud Hectors? - Through battle, out of battle, under the grass, - Dust behind your hoof-beats rises, and into dust, - Clouded, you pass. - - I’m a pretty rider, I’m a proud Hector, - I as you a little am pretty and proud; - I with you am riding, riding to the moonrise, - So sing we loud-- - - “Out beyond the dust lies mystery of moonrise, - We go to chiller learning than is bred in the sun, - Hectors, and riders, and a simple singer, - Riding as one.” - - - - -DEER - - - Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer. - They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near - Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live, - Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive, - Treading as in jungles free leopards do, - Printless as evelight, instant as dew. - The great kine are patient, and home-coming sheep - Know our bidding. The fallow deer keep - Delicate and far their counsels wild, - Never to be folded reconciled - To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are: - Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar, - These you may not hinder, unconfined - Beautiful flocks of the mind. - - - - -TO ONE I LOVE - - - As I walked along the passage, in the night, beyond the stairs, - In the dark, - I was afraid, - Suddenly, - As will happen you know, my dear, it will often happen. - I knew the walls at my side, - Knew the drawings hanging there, the order of their placing, - And the door where my bed lay beyond, - And the window on the landing-- - There was even a little ray of moonlight through it-- - All was known, familiar, my comfortable home; - And yet I was afraid, - Suddenly, - In the dark, like a child, of nothing, - Of vastness, of eternity, of the queer pains of thought, - Such as used to trouble me when I heard, - When I was little, the people talk - On Sundays of “As it was in the Beginning, - Is Now, and Ever Shall Be....” - I am thirty-six years old, - And folk are friendly to me, - And there are no ghosts that should have reason to haunt me, - And I have tempted no magical happenings - By forsaking the clear noons of thought - For the wizardries that the credulous take - To be golden roads to revelation. - I knew all was simplicity there, - Without conspiracy, without antagonism, - And yet I was afraid, - Suddenly, - A child, in the dark, forlorn.... - And then, as suddenly, - I was aware of a profound, a miraculous understanding, - Knowledge that comes to a man - But once or twice, as a bird’s note - In the still depth of the night - Striking upon the silence ... - I stood at the door, and there - Was mellow candle-light, - And companionship, and comfort, - And I knew - That it was even so, - That it must be even so - With death. - I knew - That no harm could have touched me out of my fear, - Because I had no grudge against anything, - Because I had desired - In the darkness, when fear came, - Love only, and pity, and fellowship, - And it would have been a thing monstrous, - Something defying nature - And all the simple universal fitness - For any force there to have come evilly - Upon me, who had no evil in my heart, - But only trust, and tenderness - For every presence about me in the air, - For the very shadow about me, - Being a little child for no one’s envy. - And I knew that God - Must understand that we go - To death as little children, - Desiring love so simply, and love’s defence, - And that he would be a barren God, without humour, - To cheat so little, so wistful, a desire, - That he created - In us, in our childishness ... - And I may never again be sure of this, - But there, for a moment, - In the candle-light, - Standing at the door, - I knew. - - - - -TO ALICE MEYNELL - - - I too have known my mutinies, - Played with improvident desires, - Gone indolently vain as these - Whose lips from undistinguished choirs - Mock at the music of our sires. - - I too have erred in thought. In hours - When needy life forbade me bring - To song the brain’s unravished powers, - Then had it been a temperate thing - Loosely to pluck an easy string. - - Yet thought has been, poor profligate, - Sin’s period. Through dear and long - Obedience I learn to hate - Unhappy lethargies that wrong - The larger loyalties of song. - - And you upon your slender reed, - Most exquisitely tuned, have made - For every singing heart a creed. - And I have heard; and I have played - My lonely music unafraid, - - Knowing that still a friendly few, - Turning aside from turbulence, - Cherish the difficult phrase, the due - Bridals of disembodied sense - With the new word’s magnificence. - - - - -PETITION - - - O Lord, I pray: that for each happiness - My housemate brings I may give back no less - Than all my fertile will; - - That I may take from friends but as the stream - Creates again the hawthorn bloom adream - Above the river sill; - - That I may see the spurge upon the wall - And hear the nesting birds give call to call, - Keeping my wonder new; - - That I may have a body fit to mate - With the green fields, and stars, and streams in spate, - And clean as clover-dew; - - That I may have the courage to confute - All fools with silence when they will dispute, - All fools who will deride; - - That I may know all strict and sinewy art - As that in man which is the counterpart, - Lord, of Thy fiercest pride; - - That somehow this beloved earth may wear - A later grace for all the love I bear, - For some song that I sing; - That, when I die, this word may stand for me-- - He had a heart to praise, an eye to see, - And beauty was his king. - - - - -HARVESTING - - - Pale sheaves of oats, pocked by untimely rain, - Under October skies, - Teased and forlorn, - Ungathered lie where still the tardy wain - Comes not to seal - The seasons of the corn, - From prime to June, with running barns of grain. - - Now time with me is at the middle year, - The register of youth - Is now to sing ... - My thoughts are ripe, my moods are in full ear; - That they should fail - Of harvesting, - Uncarried on cold fields, is all my fear. - - * * * * * - - The Riverside Press - CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS - U. S. A. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, 1908-1919, by John Drinkwater - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, 1908-1919 *** - -***** This file should be named 51575-0.txt or 51575-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/1/5/7/51575/ - -Produced by MWS, Bryan Ness, Chuck Greif and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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